From the Department of Why The Hell Not: The Air Force, having discovered that as much as half of its on-base housing for families is in disrepair, an issue which affects retention rates, is going to experiment at some bases with turning the facilities over to the private sector for maintenance and service. Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma will be one of the early test sites. Under the scheme, private contractors will bid on first upgrading and then maintaining base housing. One hundred thirty-two of Altus' 966 units will be demolished; the 834 remaining will be refurbished, and 87 new units will be built. Base housing staff will meet with contractors this fall to begin the process.

Is this a Good Thing? Altus' Denise Hastye, in charge of the project, says:

At least they seem to have their priorities in order.

Oklahoma and its residents, reports Mike Congrove at Fly Over Country, suffer from a social stigma: we are "a little slow, too rural, and unsophisticated." Much of this, though regrettably not all of it, is undeserved, but there's not a whole lot we can do about it.

Or is there? If business has an image problem, they call in the brand managers. It's time, says Mike, for Oklahoma to be "rebranded":

Well, "Baja Kansas" is probably out. Changing the name of the state is a drastic step, but Mike's right: the image of Oklahoma hovers somewhere between rustic and risible. And worse, its elected officials seem to like it that way. Maybe it will take something as dramatic as a name change — or the threat of annexation by Arkansas.

I'm sure something like this has happened elsewhere at some point, but there's a definite Only In Oklahoma air about it just the same.

Glen Hampton is running (as an Independent) for one of the three Commissioner positions in McIntosh County, against incumbent Democrat J. D. Williams. Hampton's qualifications include experience on county road crews: he runs a grader under the supervision of, um, Commissioner J. D. Williams. Or anyway, he used to run a grader; Hampton reports that he was fired shortly after filing for the post with the county election board. Now Hampton has filed a $100,000 wrongful-termination tort claim against the county, which contends that he wasn't really fired but is on a leave of absence. Williams isn't saying a word, but this isn't the first time he's sacked someone and got slapped with litigation for so doing, either.

Lynn at Poet and Peasant takes on Mike Congrove's "Rebrand Oklahoma" proposal:

They learn quickly enough: the TV stations go out of their way to mention every podunkular town possible during their alleged newscasts, and the aggrieved residents are quick to complain if their little paradise is mispronounced.

But nomenclature, Lynn thinks, is the least of our problems:

Not everything "right-wing" can be fairly categorized as either "idiotic" or "extremist" — some such notions are occasionally endorsed in this corner, in fact — but a perfunctory glance through almost any issue of The Oklahoma Observer (geez, Frosty, get a Web site, wouldja?) will reveal some of what Lynn's talking about. If you've ever had any reservations about Bertrand Russell's quip that "there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence," a few weeks in Soonerland may prove to be scary.

Fortunately, our bloggers are brilliant.

Well, I'm just back from the voting "booth" — in actuality, it's a cardboard box with sides just high enough to keep Joe Schmoe from looking over your shoulder — and it occurs to me that if the idea of redrawing the precinct lines was to equalize the size of the precincts, they botched the job bigtime. Two adjacent precincts share this polling place, though they have separate staffs and separate machines, and the one in which I live had drawn four times as many voters with two hours (of twelve) left to go. Somebody needs to rethink these boundaries.

The one good thing about Oklahoma elections is that they're almost immune to Florida-style screwups. All the properly-marked ballots (improperly-marked ballots are immediately expelled by the machine and the voter is given another chance) are sealed, loaded into trucks and driven to the county seats; final results will be in well before midnight.

Even in Oklahoma, incumbents don't always get a free ride. State Senator Dave Herbert, first elected in 1986, was tossed out on his ear this time around by political novice Joe Smith, who had the advantage of name recognition — everyone knows a Joe Smith, even if it wasn't this Joe Smith — and a push from organized labor, which was presumably in the mood to punish Herbert for expediting a referendum on right-to-work. Smith is a Democrat; he will face Republican Cliff Aldridge in November.

Contrary to what some East Coast pundits might have thought, J. C. Watts didn't give up his seat in Congress because he feared being defeated this fall; even after redistricting, Watts wasn't in any danger. His anointed successor, political consultant Tom Cole, easily won the GOP nod for the Fourth District seat, and the top two Democrats will likely destroy each other in the runoff, which would put Cole in the so-far unfamiliar position of being able to hire his own political consultant.

And in the District 1 Commissioner race in Oklahoma County, previously harped on herein, it will be Jim Roth vs. Beverly Hodges in the general election.

The big story, though, is the gubernatorial race. Frank Keating won't be back due to term limits. Former First District Rep. Steve Largent breezed to an easy GOP primary win; the Democrats (again!) have a runoff. Vince Orza, who will likely win this runoff, ran for governor in 1990 when he was a relatively-moderate Republican. Whether he'll do any better as a relatively-conservative Democrat remains to be seen.

NewsOK.com, the joint venture between KWTV television and The Daily Oklahoman, got a facelift over the weekend. What it didn't get, of course, was an injection of content, so NewsOK.com remains what it was: exactly the sort of Web site you'd expect from two organizations who didn't put any work into their sites when they were separate.

On the plus side, at least they're not making you register, unless you're browsing the archives for items older than three days. The Tulsa World charges forty-five bucks a year for access to just about anything, which might be defensible if they carried anything much that wasn't already on the AP wire.

He won 599 games, missing the 600th by one point in his last game before retirement. "Damn referees," he said. "I'll miss them less than anybody."

Abe Lemons had a quip for everything. He coached basketball for thirty-four years: eighteen at Oklahoma City University, three at Pan-American University, six at the University of Texas, and then seven more years at OCU.

"Maybe it would be best for me to finish at 599," said Abe. "People seem to like you better when you finish just short."

Naw. Everybody liked Abe, win or lose, and 63.6 percent of the time it was win.

And now he's gone. His name is over the door of the basketball arena at OCU; his influence will be felt by everyone in Oklahoma hoops for many years to come.

Back on the 26th of May, the Interstate 40 bridge over the Arkansas River near Webbers Falls, Oklahoma was struck by two barges; a span collapsed into the river, and fourteen people were killed.

Funding has now been obtained to build a memorial at the site. The bridge has since been reopened and traffic is flowing normally, or as normally as it can flow on I-40. I rather expect that most drivers coming through won't pay a whole lot of attention to the memorial; this is fine with me, so long as they pay a whole lot of attention to their driving. Too many of them don't.

Runoff elections are today, and the two biggest races are on the Democratic side of the aisle, for seats currently held by Republicans.

Governor Frank Keating is out due to term limits, and while Rep. Steve Largent easily won the Republican primary, none of the four Democrats were runaway favorites, forcing a runoff. I tend to prefer Vince Orza over Brad Henry, Orza's previous dalliance with the GOP notwithstanding, and I'd prefer a bowl of blue Jell-O over Steve Largent.

David Walters, who used to be governor, and who got into some serious trouble with campaign finances during his term, will face Tom Boettcher for the right to lose to Senator Jim Inhofe in November.

There are other things going on, but these are the ones that are going to get the breathless, insipid local news coverage tonight.

And, in the case of the Oklahoma gubernatorial race, Democrats have declared that they'd rather have a candidate who has been loyal to the party apparatus than one who might actually win the general election.

Now to November, where Brad Henry will lose, and lose big, to a GOP empty suit.

The OkiePundit (you knew there had to be one, didn't you?) analyzes that business about the Muskogee student who was suspended for pointing a finger, weapon-like, at classmates.

I was going to say something to the effect of "They'll get my finger when they pry it off my cold, dead hand," but it's probably easier just to give it to them.

The OkiePundit reports on a sighting of the man widely expected to be the next governor:

Actually, in this state, working the powers is usually enough, and Largent, being (1) a certified Christian conservative and (2) very, very slow on the uptake, has probably already endeared himself to them. (There is no shortage of bright Christian conservatives, but they never seem to run for office around these parts.)

Wynken, Blynken and Nod, the three candidates for governor of Oklahoma, do seem to agree on two things: that we ought to have a technology sector, and that it ought to be encouraged.

Oh, and one other thing: that the means by which this encouragement would be implemented should be as vague and inchoate as possible, at least until the election.

Actually, with dot-com dominoes still dropping, there may be nothing left of Oklahoma's tech sector by November but me. And frankly, none of these guys does anything for me.

What does the "Oklahoma Street" have to say about Life, The Universe, And Everything? The New York Times takes a stab at it, but Greg Hlatky has already figured out where the Times buys its knives.

Lynn Sislo, grumbling about that New Jersey hack Amiri Baraka:

Well, we do have one. In fact, we have a new one every two years, appointed by the governor. Through 2002, it's Carl Sennhenn, whose day job is Associate Dean of Humanities at Rose State College in Midwest City.

You're welcome.

Two hundred thirteen million dollars.

That's how much the state of Oklahoma is going to come up short in the FY 2003 budget. Absent some sort of divine intervention, or, say, Eddie Gaylord putting the whole deficit on his MasterCard, spending must be cut — the state Constitution prohibits going into the hole — and each department is expected to pull its own weight.

The Department of Corrections has a budget-cutting plan which involves furloughing (a state term meaning "involuntary unpaid vacation") its staffers for a total of twenty-three days between now and the 30th of June. Upset, a couple of hundred Corrections employees put in an appearance at the steps of the Capitol, hoping to draw attention to themselves and their plight. Corrections is, by some estimates, about 20 percent understaffed already, so the furloughs will exacerbate matters, but there simply isn't any extra money at the moment, the Legislature is not in session and will not likely be called into special session between now and Election Day, and revenue projections continue to decline.

What does the state plan to do? There's little or no support for raising taxes, and enacting new ones is even less likely. Maybe Oklahoma can start buying tickets in the Kansas lottery.

Well, not exactly, but the Oklahoma delegation, five Republicans and one Democrat, went for House Joint Resolution 114 — the resolution that authorized the President to use force against Iraq — six to zip.

I'm curious: did any other state delegation with three or more Representatives vote this way?

The county's so-called Drug Court, which provides an alternate jurisdiction for nonviolent drug offenses — individuals who plead guilty to same are put on treatment programs and report to the Drug Court rather than to the normal (and overcrowded) criminal-justice system — is apparently successful enough to justify a spinoff. The new Mental Health Court will open on the first of November and will provide supervision for offenders who are diagnosed with a recognizable mental illness. Given the sheer number of people who might qualify — county officials estimate that 20 percent of current jail inmates are "severely" mental ill — this court could further reduce the backlog at Criminal Court.

The state authorized this court during the past legislative session, but provided no funding for it, so the county is scrambling for money to operate the court and has asked for $500,000 next fiscal year. Sounds like a bargain to me, if it works.

I have tended to regard outgoing 1st District Representative Steve Largent, currently running for governor, as the emptiest of empty suits. Apparently, though, he is discerning enough to recognize crapola when he hears it.

Two cheers, maybe 2.2.

The OkiePundit scans the magazine rack at the supermarket, and he is not impressed:

Scientific American sells fewer than 150,000 copies on newsstands worldwide. The number of copies finding their way into Oklahoma food stores is inevitably very small.

And I bet there are probably more college graduates reading Guns & Ammo than he thinks.

The Columbia Journalism Review hands out Darts and Laurels as deemed appropriate, a feature copied by, among others, The Oklahoma Observer (which uses the same terminology) and TV Guide (where it's Cheers and Jeers). For that matter, even my site could be said to be ripping off CJR; over in the navigation section, there is a list of "Inspirations" and another of "Irritations".

And speaking of Darts, The Daily Oklahoman was the only media organization to pick up two (of seven delivered) in the current CJR. I tend to doubt that this brings them much in the way of bragging rights, but you never know with the Oklahoman; they've always seemed to enjoy the edge of pariahdom.

Bank of Oklahoma's corporate sister, Bank of Texas (well, of course), is going after lone-starred dollars in a big way, picking up a Houston bank and looking for other acquisitions. With the oil patch wasting away in Mergerville, hardly anything seems to have headquarters in Oklahoma anymore, so maybe the rise of a BOK Financial empire will bring some investment money this way.

I've been to Sallisaw, Oklahoma a couple of times, and while it would be unfair to call it "sleepy", it's not the most rambunctious place on the map.

Yesterday, some self-absorbed high-school doofus took it upon himself to wake up the place in the worst way, and when his petulant tirade ended — the police shot out the tires of his pickup truck — two people were dead, at least eight were hurt, and the twerp was in jail. He's 18, so they'll throw the book at him.

This being Oklahoma, no one is likely to start shrieking about some imagined need for stricter gun laws, but there's always going to be the question: "How is it that this state produces so many goddamn idiots?" None of the standard responses — weird religious groups, generally low educational levels, scant per capita income, proximity to Texas and/or Arkansas — is likely to provide any answers.

(Before you comment: I was strange before I got here.)

The Tulsa World poll shows that while Oklahomans want something done about the sad state of the state budget, they're not in agreement on exactly what that something should be.

Fully 77 percent of the respondents were happy to increase so-called "sin" taxes, though there was no real enthusiasm for any other tax or fee increases. And while 77 percent (again!) called for trimming waste at state agencies, no individual agency is considered the worst offender.

The state has no choice but to balance its budget — it's a Constitutional requirement — and what's most likely to happen is that state agencies will go through the motions of tightening their belts, and low-level state employees will be sacrificed to preserve the positions of their bosses. In other words, nothing new.

Yet there is meth in't: while state agencies in places like Florida and New Jersey agonize over the fate of absentee ballots, Oklahoma takes a free-market approach. Down in Keota, a wide spot in the road in Haskell County, an absentee ballot is worth $20 or the equivalent quantity of methamphetamine.

Then again, what's an equivalent quantity? The powers that be figure three pounds of the stuff to be worth $800,000, so I'm figuring that either it's a far, far better drug than anything I take, or they're quoting Pentagon prices.

Meanwhile, the snarky (and dashedly cute) Arkansawyer at Liquid Courage has some suitable thoughts on the subject.

Daniel Fears got his first day in court yesterday, during which he was read eighteen charges, including two charges of first-degree murder. Preliminary hearings will be 24 February; until then, Fears will remain in the Sallisaw jail. The defense will likely file a request for a mental-competency hearing in the interim. And the little town on I-40 will wonder just what it was that they had seen last weekend: a young man gone temporarily bonkers, or a brief but lethal flash of pure evil.

Last night I was sitting at my desk, waiting for the arrival of various ghosts and goblins, and, in tune with the date, I was contemplating the kinds of pain and sorrow that I could reasonably expect in the next few years, other than the obvious one of going to work. Two things hit me at once: I have a dental appointment next Tuesday, and right after that appointment, I get to stuff myself into the voting booth.

Okay, not the stuff of medieval torture chambers, but certainly enough to register on the Discomfort Meter. And since I'd already picked out my candidates, I figured I might as well do some research on the bevy of State Questions on this year's ballot. The results, such as they are, can be seen in The Vent. As for the ghosts and goblins, they apparently got the night off.

Lynn Sislo is not impressed with Oklahoma cockfighting or its boosters:

Well, of course not. Nobody bets on baseball. Except Pete Rose.

Lynn continues:

Taking the last point first, the country isn't stealing our children; they're high-tailing it out of here first chance they get.

But I wrestled with this question (which is, incidentally, State Question 687) for half a day, and while I suspect I find the cockfighting culture, such as it is, every bit as distasteful as Lynn does, I'm not ready to baldly go where so many have gone before and say, "I hate this. Let's ban it." If I could ban everything I didn't like, there wouldn't be a hell of a lot left.

Still, the ban is likely to pass — last poll I heard projected 62 percent in favor — and being excessively introspective by nature, I have to wonder: how much of my position is based on rock-bottom conviction, and how much is an effort to persuade myself that I'm much more open-minded than anyone else thinks?

Welcome to Dustbury, where every guess comes with a second-guess free.

A month ago, I'd have told you that Steve Largent, former First District congressman now running for governor, was a shoo-in. Now I'm not so sure. The gap between Largent, a Republican, and Democratic rival Brad Henry, is within the margin of error of your favorite poll. And Independent Gary Richardson is actually not trailing by much; instead of the expected two or three percent for someone outside the D/R axis, Richardson is pulling more than 20 percent in the polls.

The usual last-minute sources of campaign funds are coming through on schedule, and the advertising blitz is on. This one, I think, is going right down to the wire.

Not that anyone takes my advice on anything, but these are the results I'm looking for on Tuesday:

Governor: It's hard to work up much enthusiasm for any of these guys. Brad Henry is your average faceless Democrat, and the GOP's Steve Largent basically does what he's told. That leaves Independent Gary Richardson, who is a flake. But he's an independent flake, and weirder yet, he's not trailing by much. At the very least, he would make things interesting, and in Oklahoma, where the governor's powers are rather sharply circumscribed anyway, "interesting" counts for more than you'd think it would.

Lieutenant Governor: Republican Mary Fallin has done this job for four years without causing too much grief. But Laura Boyd, one of the smartest (if occasionally one of the more quixotic, for a Democrat anyway) state legislators we've had in recent years, is running against her, after going nowhere in the governor's race in 1998, and I'd like to see her back in the public eye.

US Senate: This boils down to a choice between former Democratic governor David Walters, ambitious but deeply flawed, and incumbent Republican Jim Inhofe, who has no depth of any kind. It's Walters, barely, but he isn't going to win this one anyway.

US House, District 1: John Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, has been mostly an embarrassment. I don't expect much better from Democrat Doug Dodd, but rotating the idiots is closer to my idea of democracy in action.

US House, District 2: The GOP's sacrificial lamb in the most Democratic district in the state is one Kent Pharaoh. Incumbent Brad Carson will wash him into the sea.

US House, District 3: Frank Lucas, who used to represent District 6 back when we had a District 6, is easily the best of the current Republicans in the state delegation; the Democrats didn't even bother to put up an opponent this year. There's an Independent running on general principles, but Lucas is the master of this domain.

US House, District 4: The old stomping grounds of J. C. Watts. Longtime GOP attack dog Tom Cole is certainly more interesting, and possibly less annoying, than colorless Democratic state rep Darryl Roberts.

US House, District 5: Anything sentient, and some things that aren't, would be an improvement over Republican incumbent Ernest Istook. Neither Democrat Lou Barlow nor Independent Donna Davis has impressed greatly, but then, they don't have to; I'd prefer Davis.

Attorney General: It's Democrat Drew Edmondson over Republican Denise Bode; Bode was unimpressive during her stay at the Corporation Commission, and Edmondson annoys the state's fat cats, always a good sign.

Superintendent of Public Education: I've supported Sandy Garrett, the Democratic incumbent, in the past, but I think she's stayed too long and become too entrenched. I have some qualms about Lloyd Roettger, the GOP challenger; still, it's time for a change at this office, so here's to Dr. Roettger.

Labor Commissioner: Had Tim Pope won the Republican primary for this position, I'd have voted for him, if only because he was actually willing to question whether the post was worth keeping. Incumbent Brenda Reneau Wynn, who did win the primary, has always rubbed me the wrong way, and she has the unique distinction of being the only statewide officeholder ever to have a Tulsa World endorsement revoked. On the other hand, Lloyd Fields, last seen as a Democratic state representative, has thus far given me no reason to think he will do much to improve the system.

Insurance Commissioner: (Yeah, I know, why is this an elective office?) Incumbent Carroll Fisher, a Democrat, is fairly innocuous; opponent Doug Barry, a Republican, argues mainly that he's not Carroll Fisher. Advantage, such as it is: Fisher.

Auditor and Inspector: I'm inclined to give this one to Democrat Jeff McMahan, protégé of retiring auditor Clifton Scott, whose track record was pretty decent, though I see no real faults in Republican Gary Jones.

And that's the way I see 'em. That and $2.99 (plus tax) will get you one of the cheaper combo meals, if you don't upsize anything.

Briefly:

693, 696, 697, 701, 702, 703: YES.

687, 698, 704: NO.

My reasoning, or lack thereof, can be seen here.

One hour to go before the polls close, and the state's estimate of one million voters strikes me as just a hair on the low side. At my precinct, there was a steady stream at 5 pm, but with a dozen "booths" available, things moved quickly enough; I was in and out in less than three and a half minutes. Then again, I knew (in fact, most of you knew) exactly which boxes I was going to mark.

Projections of winners, you ask? Too early yet.

Goodbye, Steve, and don't let a towel hit you in the keister on the way out.

Brad Henry, who wasn't even the front-runner in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, appears to have won all the marbles tonight, sliding past Steve Largent in what was thought to be a safe Republican slot. In his report for Fly Over Country, Chris explains why:

Makes sense to me.

On the other hand, the GOP doesn't have a whole lot else to cry about; they will still hold all but one seat in the state's Congressional delegation, returning three incumbents and holding the District 4 seat vacated by J. C. Watts. (The Fox News site called District 4 for Democrat Darryl Roberts about an hour ago, which may have been a typo, since they hadn't called Districts 2 or 3, which were never in doubt; AP and other sources have called District 4 for Republican Tom Cole.)

But what you really want to know is: what about those cocks? Back and forth, up and down, all night, so far. But with 90 percent of the precincts reporting, the cockfighting ban was starting to catch on at the 54-percent level, and it looks like it will hold up.

The Oklahoma State Election Board will certify results on or before Friday afternoon, and they'll be readable here.

Oklahoma State Rep. Frank Shurden (D-Henryetta), one of the more reliably loose cannons in the legislature, has announced that he's planning a bill for next session to reduce the penalties for cockfighting imposed by the newly-enacted ban. No one, says Shurden, should have to serve jail time for participating.

And Shurden may have an ally in Governor-elect Brad Henry, who in the past has characterized the penalties as too severe and yesterday said that the cure might be worse than the disease.

What is most likely to happen, with or without Shurden's bill, is that cockfighting will eventually become one of those laws which is enforced selectively: the state is likely to look the other way unless they're trying to stick it to someone for some other reason. In rural Oklahoma, things will go on pretty much the way they always have.

Yeah, I know: The Guardian. But Matthew Engel actually manages to make some sense of the Oklahoma cockfighting dust-up:

And a point I myself made somewhere along the way:

Then again, it wouldn't be The Guardian without a shot at what's really bothering them:

Somehow I have a feeling that if there had been a cockfighting referendum in, say, Gaza, there wouldn't be any snide references to "murderous maniacs".

(Muchas gracias: Andrea Harris.)

I never knew Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who worked his way up the ranks at The Tulsa Tribune to the publisher's office, but anyone who cared anything about Oklahoma journalism in those days knew his work, and mourned ten years ago when the Tribune closed its doors. A few thoughts along these lines, this week in The Vent, now in issue #317 with no (well, not much) sign of slowing down.

When The Road Information Program announced in May that Oklahoma had the worst bridges in the country, almost none of us were surprised; while only one bridge in the state (I-44 at 51st in Tulsa) made the Bottom 100 list, fully a third of the state's bridges are considered "structurally deficient," and another 7 percent are "functionally obsolete."

Bringing all these bridges up to spec would cost about $5.4 billion, which of course we don't have. Senator Jim Inhofe is chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which means that he may be able to scare up a few more dollars in federal highway funds. In an unexpected move, Robert Milacek, a Republican state senator from Enid, has proposed a state vote on an increase in fuel taxes to pay for improvements. The alternative? Perhaps federal "wheel stamps," to help pay for auto suspension parts broken while trying to traverse these battered old bridges.

How predictable was this? District Judge Willard Driesel has granted a temporary injunction barring enforcement of Oklahoma's new cockfighting ban in the area of his jurisdiction: Choctaw, McCurtain and Pushmataha counties. A permanent injunction will be sought; the state has already announced it will appeal the judge's decision.

Judge Driesel, for his part, has a problem with the ban as written: "You're making extinct the very bird the state says it is trying to protect." If he'd stopped there...but no. Instead, he took the plunge into Preposterous Metaphor Land with this whopper: "We punish child molesters but don't prohibit the raising of children."

Anyone up for a statewide ban on schoolyard fights?

It's a safe bet that no one knows for sure just how things are going to work out with this new ban on cockfighting. Last week, a judge ordered a temporary injunction against its enforcement in three southeastern counties.

Perhaps we can learn something from Kentucky's experience. Cockfighting has been illegal in Kentucky for over a hundred years, but it still goes on, and law enforcement gives it a relatively low priority; last year, Mike Hall, Pike County Attorney, asked about those priorities, snapped, "As soon as we get rid of all the drug problems and drunk driving and domestic violence, I'm going to ask the police to mount an all-out effort against chicken fighting."

I suspect this may take a while.

Well, there's the Port of Catoosa, outside Tulsa, which actually supports a fair amount of shipping (barging?) traffic, but other than that, we're pretty much landlocked here in Soonerland. We don't care. You walk into Albertson's and head for the Butcher Block meat counter in the back, and you'll find that two-thirds of the space is used to display shrimp and fish and lobster and crab, and only a smidgen of it is that fake "krab" stuff made of ground mopheads. There were even dolphins at the Oklahoma City Zoo, until some of them took ill and the zoo eventually decided to close the exhibit.

No dolphins at the new Oklahoma Aquarium, which will open in the spring near Jenks. They expect half a million visitors a year, and I can't imagine them missing the target; we do love our wet stuff.

The Big Tree in the courtyard is suddenly about one-third less Big; the ice storm frosted up the limbs, a hard freeze afterwards made sure the ice wasn't going to melt, and gravity took care of the rest.

I don't think it's doomed — while there's a nasty break in the trunk, it's not the worst this tree has ever suffered — but if you're in the habit, as I am, of thinking that trees are something that endure no matter what, the sight of massive branches not exactly writhing on the ground is a shock to the system.

Besides, I know better than "no matter what"; another tree in the same courtyard, twenty-five feet away or so, fell victim to bagworms a few years ago and did not recover. Only a fragment of stump and an odd grass pattern remain to attest to its existence.

Evidently reminders of mortality have more effect on me now than they did when I was young and semi-indestructible.

Governor-elect Brad Henry said yesterday that he will oppose a proposal to raise Oklahoma's state sales tax from 4.5 to 5.5 percent as a way to fill the estimated $700 million shortfall in the state's budget.

This is perhaps a tad less courageous than it looks: almost every county in the state levies an additional sales tax, as do most municipalities. Add it all up and you're paying a stiff 8.375 percent in Oklahoma City, which isn't even the highest in the state. It's not likely that Henry would want to start his term by pushing some Oklahoma towns perilously close to ten percent, especially if there's some joker around to point out that the sales tax in New York City is a mere 8.25 percent.

But still: a Democrat who disdains raising taxes. How often do you get to hear that?

George Lang churned out a five-page piece about blogs for the Oklahoma Gazette this week, with quotes from Joshua Micah Marshall, Andrew Sullivan and Joe Conason, screen shots from all of the above plus one from Glenn Reynolds, and the obligatory interview with a journalism professor — in this case, Mark Hanebutt of the University of Central Oklahoma, who opined:

Reasonable enough. But George, couldn't you have found it in your heart to talk to so much as one blogger actually in Oklahoma?

NewsOK.com, the Web site of The Daily Oklahoman and KWTV, is asking visitors "Do you want the smallpox vaccine?" As poll questions go, this one ought to get points for simplicity, if nothing else.

As of this writing, just over 40 percent of the respondents have said "Yes." (The only other response was "No," which of necessity is drawing just under 60 percent.) This isn't at all scientific, of course, but I wonder if comparable figures are available from other areas.

What everyone wants to know, apparently, is whether Senator Don Nickles (R-OK) can wrest the Majority Leader position away from Trent "You don't know how sorry I am, but just wait" Lott.

It is no particular secret that Nickles has been pining for Lott's job. But with the rest of the Senate Republicans basically sitting on their hands, Nickles' call for a new vote looks almost like Actual Leadership, something the GOP has not been getting from Lott. Oklahoma Republicans are giddy over the prospect, and given the electoral drubbing they got this fall — expected to make substantial gains, they lost a couple of legislative seats and the Governor's mansion to boot — it's perfectly understandable.

What sort of person is Don Nickles? On the left-right scale, he's not so far from Lott: the American Conservative Union's lifetime ratings put Lott at 93, Nickles at 96; Lott got a zero in 2001 from Americans for Democratic Action, who gave Nickles a 10. Myself, I find him a tad indigestible, though nowhere nearly as distress-inducing as the other Oklahoma senator, Jim Inhofe, a man to whom clues are a personal affront. And I've been known to grumble about Nickles' off-again-on-again support for term limits (hint: when it comes to him, it's off). But the GOP could do a hell of a lot, or a Lott, worse.

Those huge sort-of-rectangular shipping containers are common sights at port cities, not so common elsewhere. Certainly you wouldn't expect one in Calera, Oklahoma. But there it is, next door to the police department, blocking the view of the mural painted on the building's side.

This big ol' box is Calera's response to being charged as much as $800 a month by Bryan County for use of the county jail. The shipping container can hold as many as twelve inmates on a short-term basis; cots are anchored to the interior walls.

Many residents consider the box to be an eyesore, and after the complaints started to pile up, the trustees of the town decided to schedule an election in March to determine whether it should be kept or removed.

Me? I don't know. It's definitely not very pretty. On the other hand, it's a jail, not a museum; a certain amount of starkness would seem to be inherent in the concept.

For fiscal year 2004, the state of Oklahoma will have approximately $600 million less to spend, a ten-percent hit to the state's budget.

That's the glum story from the Office of State Finance, which each year is required to produce revenue projections for the next year. The Board of Equalization may tweak the figures before the Legislature approves a budget in February. But there's simply no way to tweak away a deficit this large, and since the state Constitution prohibits deficit spending, there will be cuts. Big cuts. The state income tax will rise slightly because of an automatic indexing provision enacted a few years back, but the operative word is "slightly".

It's going to be a long year for state planners.

The local Burger King franchise will pay $187,000 to settle a civil-rights lawsuit filed by a male employee with learning disabilities who claims he was strip-searched and sexually harassed by a female assistant manager.

I'd say that it seems he learned fast enough, but that would be cruel and uncalled-for.

It's no particular secret that Oklahoma, like many other states, is in dire financial straits this year, no thanks to a stagnant economy and rising expenses.

There is one bright spot on the horizon, though: natural gas prices, while not quite through the roof, are definitely knocking on the ceiling. And Oklahoma, a major producer of the stuff, collects a production tax based upon those prices.

The state budget anticipates $252 million from the tax this coming year, a projection based upon an expected market price of $2.52/mcf (thousand cubic feet). However, the current market price, due to low production and nasty weather, is more than twice that: the closing price Tuesday was $5.15, and most analysts expect the price to hold above $4.00 for at least a year, maybe longer, depending on how much (if any) production increases. At four bucks per mcf, the take from the gas-production tax would be about $147 million higher, which would put a sizable dent in the state's projected $593 million shortfall.

After that West Virginia chap picked up some spare change in the Powerball game this month, a small circle of Sooners started wondering out loud just why it is that Oklahoma doesn't have a lottery of its own. The short answer is simple: the last time it was put to a vote of the people, it lost, and Brad Henry, then a state senator, tried but failed to get a new initiative on the ballot this year.

In 2003, though, Brad Henry is the governor, and will have more of a bully pulpit to push for the numbers game. But there's yet another sticky wicket: should the state enact a lottery, the door will be opened for lotteries to be operated by Native American tribes in the state.

Tribal lotteries could theoretically put a serious dent into a state-run game, since they won't have receipts earmarked for state purposes and won't pay state taxes, which means that they could offer bigger jackpots, which will attract money that might otherwise have gone to the state lotto. Other forms of tribal gaming exist in the state already and are largely flourishing, though there's nothing here to compare with, say, Foxwoods.

But would the state's forty or so tribes strike out on their own, or band together to produce one really big game? A lot of questions are out there, and the answers seem a long way off.

On the 26th of May, 2002, a barge took out a 400-foot section of bridge on Interstate 40 in eastern Oklahoma near Webbers Falls, dropping ten vehicles 50 feet into the Arkansas River. Fourteen people were killed.

The monument planned for the Webbers Falls area — the bridge has since been reconstructed and reopened — will stand fourteen feet tall (of course) and will be topped off by the sculpture of a girl, her arms raised skyward, to commemorate the youngest victim, a three-year-old Arkansas girl. The monument will be constructed in part with metal from the wrecked bridge.

Assuming there is a World Tour 2003, and further assuming that the monument will be completed by mid-July when WT03 is most likely to occur, I'll schedule a side trip to see it up close.

In case anyone had any doubts about it, Governor Henry was serious about that we-need-a-lottery business he was spouting before the election. He's got a sponsor for a lottery measure in the State House, and is shopping for a Senate sponsor. The Democratic establishment seems to be viewing the prospect favorably; the Republicans, dominated by conservative Christians, are likely not keen on the idea, but I believe they'll go along with Henry's call for a referendum, since this issue has been up for a vote before and it has always lost.

Last month, I raised the spectre of tribal gaming as a potential threat to a state lottery. Henry isn't worried; he says the tribes don't have the infrastructure — in particular, they don't have enough retail access — to implement a lottery large enough to present a threat.

If the Guv gets his way, the referendum will be in late summer. I want to see the particulars before I decide how I'll vote on it.

Monday, a task force led by Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune will discuss the disbanding of the Tulsa Philharmonic, and what, if anything, can be done about it. The orchestra's board, seeing no way to get around a debt load of $1 million, has suspended the rest of the season and closed the office.

We know this situation here at the other end of the Turner Turnpike. The Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra folded in 1988. It took some doing, a lot of donations, and some concessions from the American Federation of Musicians, but we have an orchestra again. There's really no reason they can't do the same in Tulsa.

I made a point of keeping my mouth shut yesterday, the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, mainly because I felt I didn't have anything to add to the debate, although I must point out in passing that however impassioned one's defense of Roe, it will likely never be as eloquent as some of its denunciations.

In Oklahoma, Rep. Kevin Calvey took advantage of the, um, festivities to announce a bill which would require the State Department of Health to issue a standard abortion information packet, and would impose a 24-hour waiting period before the procedure can be undertaken. While Calvey didn't go into a lot of detail regarding the contents of the packet, it can be safely assumed that it's not all sweetness and light, and the state ACLU, right on cue, complained.

And round and round we go again, Roe, Roe, Roe, not at all gently and not even slightly merrily. [Obvious next line excised because, well, it's obvious.]

Last year, the Oklahoma legislature, noting substantial increases in the state's Spanish-speaking population, passed a measure written by Sen. Bernest Cain (D-Oklahoma City) to make the state driver's test available in Spanish — though it has yet to be implemented because of a lack of funding.

This year, there's a new bill, courtesy of Rep. Ron Kirby (D-Lawton), which would require that all "official state business" be conducted in English. Cain says that Kirby's bill will supersede his; Kirby says it will do no such thing. It seems likely that if Kirby's bill should pass, the state Supreme Court will wind up deciding the matter.

And language isn't the only issue with driver's licenses this year, either. In the 1970s, state law mandated that anything on your head except prescription glasses be removed before taking the photograph to be affixed to your license, a law which remains in effect. There are no religious exemptions, for Muslim women or Roman Catholic nuns or anyone else, but here's where it gets interesting: the vast majority of license renewals are issued, not by the Department of Public Safety, but by independent agencies contracted by the state, and the law provides no penalties should the agencies fail to comply. I expect the law will be rewritten eventually, but not this year.

The major interest when a new governor has to give a State of the State speech right away is how much of his campaign agenda he will be flogging, and Brad Henry was up to the task today.

After a moment of silence for the Columbia crew, Henry pointed to the state's budget shortfall, and declared: "Our will has outstripped our wallet." The condition of that wallet didn't stop him from proposing some new expenditures, but so what else is new? At least he didn't suggest raising taxes or the ubiquitous "user fees". And once again, he called for a state lottery, receipts to be earmarked for education.

It will be an interesting year in the legislature, to be sure. Henry has a Democratic majority to work with, but not much of one, and the Republicans aren't giving out any signals just yet.

Former Representative J. C. Watts, drawing on his experiences in Congress and as a University of Oklahoma football star, will be writing a monthly column for The Sporting News, on the role of sports in contemporary society. The first installment will appear in next Monday's issue (10 February).

Following up on a report that 33,000 sex offenders who are supposed to be in California's Megan's Law database aren't there at all, the national Parents for Megan's Law organization started checking the other 49 states and asking "And how are your databases?"

In Oklahoma, at least, they stink; according to PFML, half of the state's sex offenders aren't in the state database, a figure roughly twice the national average, promptly disputed by state officials. Brian Johnson at Corrections says there will be an audit of the database, but cautions against expecting too much from the list, or from Megan's Law itself:

And, in fact, the Supreme Court heard two cases last fall challenging Megan's Law. I've always been a little uneasy about this law myself — why is it, for instance, we don't register armed robbers or white-collar criminals or other people who present threats to the community? — but you know the drill: if it's for The Children™, it must be good.

(The Children™  is a trademark of Juan Gato.)

Sometimes it's hard to get a grip on Frank Shurden. For years and years he's been pushing for a measure to allow chemical castration of sex offenders, and more recently he's been trying to come up with a workaround for cockfighting proponents, who were supposedly dealt the death blow in November's election; his most recent thinking on the subject is some sort of "county option".

The tendency, therefore, is to write off the Henryetta Democrat as some kind of crank. But, the Oklahoma legislature being full of such, it's not the disadvantage you might think. So it's Frank Shurden who gets to introduce the governor's lottery scheme into the Senate, and only God and Frosty Troy know how much wheeling and dealing will go into the final package.

The OkiePundit is not inclined to cut Shurden any slack:

Of course, a county-option lottery wouldn't work worth a darn — at best, it would increase the take from the state's fuel tax from people driving across the state to buy tickets where they could — but it could be just the thing for lottery opponents, who, after a few months of so-so business, will be able to point and say "See? We told you so!" In Oklahoma, this ability is prized more highly than gold. Or natural gas, anyway.

The Oklahoma Department of Health issued its annual We Are In Sorry-Ass Shape report yesterday, complete with ominous warnings and the usual gratuitous Third World comparison — this time to Costa Rica, where the estimated life expectancy is a tick or two higher than Oklahoma's. I searched in vain for a video from Costa Rica's last killer ice storm.

Who gets the blame? Some of it goes to the state's residents themselves, who simply can't bring themselves to conform to the standards of the New Puritanism, and some of it goes to the state, which has inexplicably failed to quintuple the tobacco tax or to enact anything resembling mandatory health insurance.

"The current state of the state's health," says the report, is "unacceptable." Well, of course. Were it excellent, you'd all be out of a job.

State Senator Frank Shurden (D-Doublewide) has actually made some progress in getting around the provisions of the state's cockfighting ban. The Senate Appropriations Committee has passed Shurden's bill to reduce the penalties for participants to misdemeanor level. The bill now goes to the full Senate, where its future is uncertain.

The OkiePundit (if permalinks aren't working, go to 20 February) is not happy with this development:

Personally, I think the bill is DOA once it reaches the full Senate, and Governor Henry wouldn't sign it if it passed, but you can't be sure with the Oklahoma legislature; sometimes they seem to be motivated by pure petulance.

The robbery at BancFirst's Expressway branch in McAlester was fairly uneventful, as robberies go. The bank staff was clever enough to switch bags, and the thief walked away with nothing.

Slowly.

Police arrested Kenneth Ray Dean in the parking lot between the bank and a restaurant in a matter of moments. Dean is 71 and walks with a cane. Of course, bank employees had no way of knowing the cane wasn't loaded.

Last time we heard from Rep. Leonard Sullivan (R-Oklahoma City), he was complaining about the North Canadian River: "I can't see any good reason for Canada to get all of that publicity," he said as he moved to rename the waterway the Oklahoma River.

I didn't think much of that scheme, but to give the guy credit, at least he's thinking outside the box. Sullivan came up with a notion this week to tie starting teacher pay (now $27,060 per year) to legislative salaries ($38,400 per year, plus travel expenses and whatnot). "I guarantee you," he said, "that Oklahoma teachers would be paid better if their salaries were tied to the compensation of state legislators." Of course, what Sullivan was proposing in these thrifty times wasn't a big raise for teachers, but a big cut for legislators.

Sullivan's resolution never made it out of committee (duh), but I have a feeling it may be back next session. By then, teachers will have put in at least nine months of work, and legislators possibly as much as five.

Back around 1928, people say, a woman driving between Wilson and Schulter missed the approach to a brand-new bridge and plunged into Montezuma Creek — and if you stand on that bridge late tonight, you can still hear her baby crying.

Is it true? I don't know. They did supposedly fish a car out of the creek, and a woman's body was recovered, but they never did find the baby. And there's not a whole lot of time left to go standing on Crybaby Bridge, because it's way short of modern-day road standards and is scheduled for demolition this spring, in a classic case of "If you don't do this now, you'll lose your funding for the new bridge."

Actually, the county did look for someone to buy the bridge and move it, but there were no takers. The $660,000 tab for replacement includes straightening out that treacherous road, but no money for ghost relocation — perhaps ironic, given this state's reported fondness for ghost employees.

Johnnie Cochran and Dennis Sweet are heading up the legal team for the Tulsa Reparations Council, a group which is seeking damages from the city of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma in compensation for the 1921 race riot in Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood.

Among other things, the suit claims that Tulsa police and the Oklahoma National Guard used violence to put down what was perceived as a "negro uprising" in Greenwood, and that afterwards, Tulsa city government reworked its zoning laws to discourage people from rebuilding in the area. State law limits liability in matters of this sort; the suit seeks to have that provision stricken from the books.

The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, which examined this matter in detail a few years ago, issued a recommendation which supported many of the suit's allegations and urged the payment of restitution to survivors of the incident. (The number of survivors is estimated at a bit over 100.) No payments of this sort have been made, though the legislature passed measures in 2001 to improve the neighborhood and provide scholarship money for descendants of survivors.

Government officials in general have yet to comment on the suit.

Doctors on strike? Not here, not yet. Still, Donald Palmisano, MD, president-elect of the American Medical Association, brought his traveling show to Oklahoma City yesterday. About 600 physicians showed up at the Capitol to protest the current legal climate, "strewn with frivolous lawsuits and exorbitant jury judgments," which has caused malpractice premiums to skyrocket in recent years.

Dr Palmisano's state-level counterpart, Dr Jack Beller, called for immediate action:

By no particular coincidence, a bill is before the Legislature to cap pain and suffering awards at $250,000 and limit contigency fees for trial lawyers.

And speaking of trial lawyers, the executive director of the Oklahoma Trial Lawyers Association was on hand to challenge the doctors:

The most telling comment, though, came from an Edmond physician:

Not just in dollars, either. I do not understand the mindset that believes medicine to be somehow equivalent to automotive mechanics, that any problem can be fixed if you replace enough parts.

On the other hand, I suspect that a substantial number of malpractice suits are brought by the same people who ruin their cars because they won't spend $75 for diagnostics when the little warning light comes on.

Governor Henry still wants a state lottery, but it won't be this year he gets it, which suggests that maybe the operators of legal gambling in the state — non-commercial (yeah, right) bingo, Indian gaming, and horse racing — are breathing a little easier for now.

Remington Park in northeast Oklahoma City has had a couple of rough years, and I was wondering if perhaps, at least in this market, thoroughbred (and occasionally quarter-horse) racing had, um, run its course. Not necessarily, seethes Jo:

Hmmm. Of course, in Oklahoma they bet on fighting chickens (or did until last November), which falls somewhere between racing and the lotto in terms of brainpower required.

And I think at least some of Powerball's appeal stems from the fact that once in a blue moon, a truly enormous payout goes to someone who kicked in a mere handful of bucks. At the track, if you put a C-note on a hundred-to-one shot that comes home, you're handed a mere ten grand (before taxes). If I were going to shoot for the $2 million it would take for me to retire (1) instantly (2) in indecent comfort, I'd never make it at the races, and the fact that the odds are astronomical against making it from the state lottery (even if we had one, which, I remind you, we don't) doesn't seem to make any impression on me.

Akron, Ohio may be the Rubber City, but the fact is, more tires are made in Oklahoma than in any other state. And Michelin North America, whose Uniroyal Goodrich unit has a huge plant in Ardmore, is about to spend $200 million to expand the facility, including $25 million kicked in by the state as incentive money.

Employment at Michelin will grow to about 1850, still smaller than Goodyear's Lawton operation, which started an expansion program of its own last year to will bring its workforce up to 2400. Bridgestone/Firestone operates a plant in Oklahoma City which employs about 1800.

Now get out there and drive. :)

Meet Jeffrey Schimandle, MD, non-practicing orthopedic surgeon in Oklahoma City. He became non-practicing rather involuntarily in 1999 following reports that he was swiping pain medication intended for patients for his personal use. This year Dr Schimandle applied for reinstatement, and got it; and within seconds of getting it, he whispered what The Daily Oklahoman called "a two-word, gender-specific obscenity" to the licensure board's attorney.

Said attorney is Elizabeth A. Scott, who also serves as an assistant attorney general; charges were brought, and Friday Dr Schimandle's license to practice was pulled yet again — not because he called Scott whatever it was he called her, but because he denied having said it. He can apply for reinstatement next year, if he can keep his mouth shut.

As for that "two-word, gender-specific obscenity", well, I'm not quite sure what the good doctor actually said, but I'd be surprised if it's truly gender-specific. Even in Oklahoma.

Former Congressman J. C. Watts is not lacking for titles these days. In addition to his gig as a columnist for The Sporting News, he's now on the board of directors of Dillard's, the Arkansas-based department-store chain.

In his new capacity, perhaps Watts can figure out how come Dillard's keeps getting into racial hot water. In 1996, the chain was sued after an African-American customer claimed that she was denied a routine cologne sample; the case wound up before the US Supreme Court, which declined to review the verdict or the $1.2-million penalty against Dillard's. And this was only the most visible of a number of cases in which the store was charged with some blatant form of discrimination.

It probably wasn't any big surprise that failed Congressional candidate Walt Roberts entered a guilty plea to various counts of conspiracy; many of us have been wondering just where this good ol' boy was finding all this campaign financing.

Now the finger has been pointed, and it's pointed toward Senator Gene Stipe, a McAlester Democrat, whose own fingers have been found in all sorts of Oklahoma pies over many years. Chris at Fly Over Country says there's a 90-percent chance they're gonna nail him this time; I think that's a tad high, but I won't shed any tears if Chris is right.

According to at least one poll, Oklahomans favor the establishment of a state lottery by a three-to-one margin. I find this surprising, since the issue has been up for a state vote before and did not come close to passage.

A few minutes before the poll results were announced, the State House had an announcement of its own: House Bill 1278, which would put the establishment of a lottery on the ballot, had failed, 52-49. Most Democrats voted Yes, most Republicans voted No, but there were defectors from both sides.

I expect Governor Henry will be back with a similar proposal next year, but for this session, it's dead.

The estimable Goof Beyou, who has been keeping tabs on the state-lottery measure (and keeping track of my fumbles on the story), has yet to weigh in on the prospects for getting the bill passed during its reconsideration phase, though I'm sure we'll hear from Beyou shortly.

In the meantime, House Republican leader Todd Hiett seems miffed at the prospect of seeing this bill again: "At this point," he said, "we should move on and do the people's business." Apparently Hiett's concept of "the people's business" does not include the possibility of voting on a controversial measure. All by itself, this ought to be enough to get him onto Frosty Troy's 10 Worst Legislators list this summer.

Opposition to the proposed Oklahoma lottery comes from many quarters, but much of it emanates from the state's churches, dominated by conservative Christian denominations who have no qualms about calling 'em the way they see 'em.

Leaders of five of those denominations have signed a letter to Governor Henry asking him to give up the idea of a lottery, and urging him to set up a "task force made up of business, government, church and education leaders to seek long-term solutions for education funding."

The Guv, himself a Southern Baptist, says he appreciates the input but still would like the lottery put to a state vote. Personally, I think the task force idea might fly even without direct government involvement, though there's always the question of whether the state will give a reasonable hearing to the ideas of non-politicians.

Tuesday, Senator Frank Shurden (D-Henryetta) expects a vote on Senate Bill 835, which proposes yet another cockfighting election, though this one will be limited to settling the penalties. Under State Question 687, passed last fall, taking part in a cockfight is a felony; Shurden wants this reduced to a misdemeanor, and he apparently thinks that while most people in Oklahoma do support the ban, which passed with 56 percent of the vote, they don't necessarily want people hauled into the pen for a year or more for it.

The House has already passed a similar measure, which suggests that Shurden might actually have a chance of getting this through. The anti-cockfighting forces are, unsurprisingly, highly incensed at all this. Meanwhile, there are legal challenges to SQ 687 in more than two dozen counties. We haven't heard the last of this issue by any means.

Senator Gene Stipe (D-McAlester), who has served in the state legislature since the French and Indian War, has abruptly resigned his seat, as projected by Chris at Fly Over Country a week ago.

Stipe's departure may or may not have something to do with the fallout from the failed Walt Roberts for Congress campaign of 1998, the investigation from which has so far resulted in charges against three individuals, one of whom is Stipe's assistant at his law firm. Stipe himself has not been named as a defendant.

As noted by Chris:

In defense of Stipe, he had better hair than Jim Traficant. And really, that's about it.

I wouldn't have thought it possible — and, in fact, said so — but Governor Henry's lottery bill isn't quite dead yet. When the vote for reconsideration came around, three Republicans who had opposed the measure the first time through voted for it, so instead of failing 52-49, it now passes 52-49 and will go on to the Senate.

Wayne Pettigrew, who represents a section of Edmond, was frank about the reasoning behind his switch:

The future of the bill in the Senate is unclear. Still, the fact that it got this far borders on miraculous.

If you've dialed somebody's 800 number, you might be talking to someone in Oklahoma; the state now boasts some seventy call centers which employ 35,000 people. One of the biggest is the AOL facility in Oklahoma City's Shepherd Mall, which has nearly 1500 staffers.

Why here? Three reasons come to mind:

• We're in the middle of the country, so it's possible to catch both coasts with minimum shift change.
  
• We're awash in fiber connections.
  
• We work cheap.
  

Well, okay, we're not as cheap as Bombay or Manila, but we're marginally easier to understand on the phone.

NewsOK.com, the joint venture of The Daily Oklahoman and KWTV, has decided that if The New York Times can do it, so can they. Starting later today, you'll have to do the registration bit to get access to any NewsOK content.

It could be worse. TulsaWorld.com not only demands your demographic information but a monthly check as well.

I was squishing my way down to the mailbox when F. (not necessarily her real initial) poked her head out of her door and acknowledged my presence.

In response, I pointed to the big elm tree out front and said, "What do you think? Dead?"

"Think so," she replied.

The big elm tree is about thirty percent less big this spring: a winter ice storm broke away one of the three major limbs, and while everything else is gradually going green — well, except the cottonwood trees along 42nd, which are already sprouting Q-tips — this tree is still barren, its branches grey, almost black in the March rain.

One does not romanticize trees on the prairie; they are there, and eventually they are not there, and you're supposed to shrug and go on. It's different in the Midwest, as H. Allen Smith once explained:

I looked at the big elm again, and maybe I did, maybe I didn't, see the faintest hint of green along the lower branches, the tender beginnings of a leaf or two or a dozen or a thousand. Then again, I was born in Illinois.

Curiously, so was H. Allen Smith.

With war now more or less inevitable, the state legislature has been working up fresh measures to deal with the possibility of terrorist attacks. Each of these bills has passed one house and must be approved by the other to become law.

HB 1467, perhaps the most controversial, empowers the state to quarantine individuals and property exposed to infectious diseases distributed by biological weapons.

SB 509 authorizes the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation to investigate acts of terrorism, and instructs the Attorney General to seek judicial authority for electronic surveillance of terrorism suspects.

SB 696 would set up vaccination programs, contingent upon receiving federal funding.

Meanwhile, the state's Congressional delegation (four Republicans and one Democrat in the House, two Republicans in the Senate) has declared itself to be in full support of the war effort.

The Oklahoma lottery remains stubbornly undead. The Senate Finance Committee, not quite along party lines, approved House Bill 1278, which will now be sent to the full Senate. Governor Henry is now officially optimistic about its passage: asked if the bill had enough votes to pass the Senate, he replied, "I think so."

The revised bill contains a provision which will discontinue the lottery should its presence open the legal door for expanded tribal gaming, which at least indicates that its proponents are aware of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

It's almost a mantra here in Oklahoma. Pleasant weather can change in a matter of minutes into something decidedly unpleasant. Large segments of the state's economy are still commodity-based — oil, agriculture, methamphetamine — leaving us highly vulnerable to marketplace volatility.

And, though nobody thinks about it very much, we have earthquakes. Nothing that will make a Californian shudder, but the state is riddled with fault lines, and seismic disturbances are even harder to predict than the weather.

Of course, if you don't like it, you can always wait a few minutes.

Delaware's got them, and they've made over $800 million for the state's General Fund.

Oregon's got them too, and they've earned nearly $1.7 billion.

"They" are video lottery terminals, and they won't be coming to Oklahoma; at least some members of the legislature are convinced that if the boxes are allowed in the proposed state lottery, there will be no recourse should tribal-gaming associations choose to use them as well, and the state might not be able to compete with the ubiquitous Indian games. Competition, you know, makes you look like you're serious about this sort of thing, and God forbid we should look like we're serious about gambling.

Oh, well. Kansas doesn't have them either.

Oklahoma Senate Bill 625, on its way to the House, would provide penalties — in some cases, felony penalties — for throwing something off a bridge.

Inspiration for the measure was a 2001 incident in which a Duncan resident was badly injured by a bottle of sulfuric acid dropped from an overpass into the windshield of her car.

No thanks to the state's ongoing budget woes, the Oklahoma Rainy Day Fund is now approaching the outskirts of Tap City. After drawing $10 million for an emergency funding package for state agencies, there's only about $100,000 left.

The Fund is replenished by a surplus of tax collections over the official revenue estimate at the end of the fiscal year (30 June); if collections are down, there will be no money to stash in the Fund.

Maybe we can try to win some money in the Kansas Lottery.

It's called, blandly enough, the Multi-Mission Sensor Test. What it actually does is simulate a biological or chemical weapon attack to see if existing radar facilities can track the stuff. The fakes vary in composition, but the ones being used here in Oklahoma consist of powdered clay, ethanol and polyethylene glycol. (Oddly enough, these are three things I have had occasion to ingest, and don't ask.)

There had been some concern over the distribution of the fakes, mostly due to the potential for allergic reactions to the original formulations, which contained egg whites and a denatured pesticide.

The Army will spread the fakes over the next couple of weeks to see how well they can be picked up on radar.

Gene Stipe, having resigned his seat in the state Senate, has been formally charged with conspiracy and perjury in connection with the 1998 Congressional campaign of Stipe protégé Walt Roberts. No court hearing date has been set, and the charges were filed by information rather than through a grand-jury indictment, which suggests that a plea bargain has already been struck.

It's hard to imagine an Oklahoma legislature without Gene Stipe — he first was elected to the Senate in 1956 — but somehow I think we'll manage.

The town of Hall Park, once on the edge of, now surrounded by, the city of Norman, is contemplating dissolving itself. Tomorrow town voters will face a measure to disincorporate, which requires a simple majority — provided that 40 percent of the town's registered voters cast ballots.

Norman has already moved to annex the 1.13 square miles of Hall Park, contingent upon the passage of the ballot measure, effective 1 October. Residents would be billed $4200 per household for upgrading to Norman city services.

I'm not sure what I think about this. When I think "Hall Park", I tend to think "speed trap", but then I've never been ticketed by the town. Maybe the 1100 or so residents will be better off in Norman; Town Manager Susan Boehrer favors the measure, saying "It's the best long-term solution, the best economical solution and the solution that's best for the environment."

And it's not a tune he particularly wanted to hear, either.

Gene Stipe, state senator since the Pleistocene era, has entered a guilty plea, admitting that he did in fact skirt election laws to funnel $245,189 to Walt Roberts' 1998 Congressional campaign. He could be fined twice that much — $490,378 — although it is not clear whether he will be required to serve any hard time. Formal sentencing will be in mid-June.

The House has passed Governor Henry's lottery bill, by the now-usual 52-49 margin. HB 1278 creates the lottery, defines where the income will be spent, and directs the Governor to call the election, which he's planning for the fall.

There's a second bill — Senate Joint Resolution 22 — which calls for another election to amend the state constitution to permit this lottery in the first place. (The state constitution is about the size of a Chevy Suburban, and nowhere near as easy to work on.) We're still a long way from voting, but the hurdles are diminishing.

Cam Edwards, who presides over the morning-drive news at KTOK in Oklahoma City, has started blogging, and there's bite to go with his broadcast bark. Linking to a piece by a Democratic Underground type who claims to live in this neck of the woods, Cam observes:

Like, say, that courageous Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova, who most recently distinguished himself by skipping a class he teaches, claiming he had received death threats after his "million Mogadishus" comment. What can be going through his head? "The use of force by the American imperialists can never be justified. Now where's that goddamn security guard Columbia was supposed to send me?"

Of course, with Cam on the scene, now I can concentrate on obscure pop-culture references, complaints about the weather, and fluffy bunnies.

Well, maybe not the bunnies.

One of the most curious incidents in Oklahoma history occurred literally on the first day of Oklahoma history. This was April 22, 1889, and settlement was being opened up in what was then known as Indian Territory, in a manner that was both highly unorthodox and uniquely American: basically, you park on it, you own it. Thousands of quarter-sections and city lots were claimed in the first few hours after the opening gun, and by the next morning, two cities with populations of 10,000 or so, their populations largely housed in quick-and-dirty shacks or hurriedly-pitched tents, stood where there had been nothing more than railroad stops before.

That was the original Oklahoma Land Run, which settled the central part of the eventual 46th state. An event like this seems utterly unimaginable in the not-exactly-freewheeling 21st century, which may explain much about why down in Norman, dozens of cast bronze figures are being assembled for the first-ever Land Run Monument, to be built along the Bricktown canal east of downtown Oklahoma City. Completion will take four years, but the first few figures will be emplaced later this month and will undoubtedly shake up travelers on the Crosstown Expressway.

The city of Moore, a suburban enclave between Oklahoma City and Norman, is considering a ban on tobacco use in municipal parks. It's not an issue of air quality, exactly: rather, it's that parents whose children participate in sports are apparently setting a bad example by lighting up a Winston between innings.

Tobacco is destined to become this century's Victorian erotica. Eventually, only rude old gentlemen will own tobacco products, and their heirs will be duly shocked when the estates are probated and the boxes in the attic are opened.

DavidMSC, who used to live in these parts, may well be surprised at this. Or he may not, depending on how jaded he was back then.

Anyway, there's a fairly innocuous strip mall along Air Depot Blvd. in Midwest City, housing insurance agents, a Furr's cafeteria in one corner, a Kinko's in another, a children's dance studio — and apparently a brothel.

The most interesting remark in the wake of the operation's bust was one by the owner of the dance studio, who said, "We suspected it was a prostitution ring from the day they first started moving in because they could never give us a straight answer as to what kind of business they were." I'm just wondering what they wrote down on the storefront lease.

This takes some serious choreography:

1. Mr Pearson, previously married to Ms Kimble, breaks into her apartment.
   
2. Ms Kimble, defending the premises, stabs Mr Pearson.
   
3. Mr Pearson, evidently insufficiently stabbed, stabs Ms Kimble.
   

And Laertes and the Queen fall, and Fortinbras is left to find someone to mop up.

Or something like that.

There have been many dynasties in American newspaper publishing, but few of them lasted as long, with as few members, as the Oklahoma Publishing Company's Gaylord family.

Edward King ("E. K.") Gaylord bought into the struggling Daily Oklahoman in 1903; by 1918, he was running the place. And E. K. continued to run the place for decades, which prompted local wags to point out that son Edward L. Gaylord would be at retirement age by the time E. K. stepped down.

As it turned out, E. K. never did step down. In May of 1974, the 101-year-old publisher sat down at his desk for the last time, and never got up. Edward L., then 55, quickly assumed command, and never let go.

Until now. Edward L. Gaylord has announced he will retire from the paper next month; former Oklahoman advertising director David Thompson will return to take over as publisher, and Ed Kelley, who has been overseeing the editorial page, will become editor. The family connection will continue: Christy Everest, Edward L.'s daughter, is already serving as president of OPUBCO.

I really don't expect any changes at the paper: it's privately held, deeply (sometimes wackily) conservative, and perplexed, like many American dailies, by stagnant circulation figures. Still, The Daily Oklahoman has outlasted all its competitors — the last, The Oklahoma Journal, folded in 1980 — and I can't imagine it going away no matter what sort of gee-whiz technological media appear in the next century or so.

This time of year, I generally emerge from the front door about ten minutes before sunrise, and there's a chorus to greet me: hundreds, maybe thousands, of local birds, some small, others not so small, all chirping and cheeping and twittering and those other verbs we use to make their sounds seem insignificant compared to our own. Two octaves of this stuff, staccato here, fermata there, a quarter-rest somewhere in the mix if you're really paying attention, and while I have to assume that most of them are oblivious to my presence — a few designated guardians have presumably issued an Intruder Alert, which I, the visiting dullard, cannot distinguish from the flow of conversation — there's still the sense that they're putting on a show, that they've waited all night for this.

Much is made these days about how our urban landscapes are supposedly inhospitable, even hostile, to life, usually from people who seem to believe that everybody should live in a facsimile of the San Diego Zoo. Life, of course, pays no attention to these people. And tomorrow, same time, same trees, the avian chorus resumes.

The new Oklahoma anti-spam law, signed yesterday by Governor Henry, strikes me as relatively toothless. It does prohibit spoofing email or Web addresses, and it does require ads to state that they are ads in the subject lines — porn ads must contain the string ADV-ADULT — but until there are provisions to hunt down spammers and disembowel them on streaming video, there will be little or no effect on the state's email users.

According to the warning sign posted just beyond its intersection with West 33rd Street, Technology Drive in Edmond, Oklahoma is a dead end.

Some people in California are eating their hearts out right now — or would be, if said hearts weren't technically animal tissue.

A mere ten days ago, I reported on the transfer of power at the Oklahoma Publishing Company, prompted by the upcoming retirement of longtime editor/publisher Edward L. Gaylord.

Gaylord's health had been deteriorating, but few outside the family knew how much. Now we know: he died last night, one month short of his 84th birthday. Cancer, that damnable stuff.

Services are Wednesday at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, a facility that benefited greatly from Gaylord's largesse over the years.

I've spent much of my life sniping at Gaylord and his paper and his politics, but I'm not about to deny that his impact on this part of the world has been genuinely profound, his influence keenly felt, his generosity gratefully received.

If you're selling a house in Oklahoma, you have to fill out a fairly-detailed disclosure form [link requires Adobe Acrobat Reader] which is supposed to reveal everything from non-functional appliances to radon gas.

One of the environmental questions seems uniquely Oklahoman: "Are you aware of existence of hazardous or regulated materials and other conditions having an environmental impact, including, but not limited to, residue from drug manufacturing?"

Not specific enough? Under a new bill, passed without opposition by the Legislature and allowed to become law without the Governor's signature, the next version of the disclosure form will be required to state whether the property has been used as a meth lab.

Next year, I expect a measure which, when I trade in my car, will require me to attest to the highest speed at which at it has been driven (101 mph) and the number of people shot by the driver or by passengers therein (none).

But without Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for his part in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Terry Nichols, whose part was judged to be less substantial, was convicted, not on murder charges, but on federal conspiracy and manslaughter charges, and is serving a prison term. The state has chosen to try him on murder charges, naming 160 victims who were not listed in the federal indictment, lest he manage to appeal his federal convictions successfully.

A preliminary hearing for Nichols was convened today to see if there is sufficient evidence to hold this trial; how long it will continue is anybody's guess.

A couple of months ago, I reported on the Big Elm Tree out front, which seemed to be in dire condition:

There has been very little rain since then — we're running at about 50 percent of normal so far this year — but the tree seems to be flourishing. About ten, maybe fifteen percent of its branches are still bare and will probably remain so, but for the most part, it's green and growing, however weirdly-shaped and asymmetrical it's become.

Living out here on the Lone Prairie evidently builds up one's stamina.

Today at Terry Nichols' preliminary hearing, his wife Marife testified that Nichols had sold fertilizer at gun shows under the name "Ground Zero Impact."

How long before, say, The New York Times demands background checks for fertilizer buyers?

Terry Nichols, convicted in federal court of conspiracy and eight counts of manslaughter in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, will now face a minimum of 160 first-degree murder charges in a state court.

No date has been set; Nichols has been serving a life term in Club Fed.

Starting the first of July, anyone applying for a driver's license in Oklahoma will be required to submit a finger scan (not as messy as a set of prints) to the Department of Public Safety. Governor Henry signed the enabling legislation yesterday, which specifies that a court order is required for anyone outside the DPS to get access to the scanned data.

The July start date means that I'll be one of the first to get this treatment (unless I get a sudden burst of anticrastination and get my license renewed before then); what I really want to know is if the independent tag agencies (an Oklahoma curiosity in which routine licensing tasks are privatized) will be provided with the scanning tools right off the bat, or if I'll have to stand in line at a DPS office.

Daniel Fears, the Sallisaw teenager accused of a shooting spree last fall that killed two and injured eight others, has been ruled competent to stand trial. A preliminary hearing has been set for the 2nd of September; in the meantime, Fears remains in the Sequoyah County jail.

During the competency hearing, it was disclosed that Fears identifies with Dr Hannibal Lecter (please tell me he didn't do this to impress Clarice), and believes he is influenced by extraterrestrials (something I doubt Dr Lecter would endorse).

Senator Cal Hobson, who presides over the upper house in the Oklahoma legislature, has come under fire for an item in his regular column in the Purcell Register, in which he comes off as embarrassingly star-struck. The star in question is Danny Glover, who has been coming up with some really preposterous statements of his own of late.

The state GOP has called on Hobson to apologize for sucking up to Glover, a notion flogged by Cam Edwards on his morning show today, further evidence that the smaller the teapot, the bigger the tempest.

Does Cal Hobson owe me an explanation? Yes. He owes me an explanation of why the state's been on this spending spree for the past few years, and how we got into this half-billion dollar hole, and why the legislature was even thinking about adjourning a week early this year. As for what he thinks about Danny Glover — geez, aren't we getting too old for this shit?

Senate Bill 565 is going back to a conference committee, after its original language, which required anyone repairing a PC to report anything that looks like kiddie pr0n, was deemed to have too much potential for abuse. (Gee, ya think?)

Worst-case scenario: The legislature, seeking ways to invade people's PCs, consults with the recording industry.

This definitely belongs in the Write Your Own Joke archives. All I can do is quote the opening paragraph:

Okay, gang, have at it.

When will Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols be tried on state murder charges? The prosecution wanted to start this coming November; defense counsel for Nichols proposed January 2005.

Now District Judge Steven M. Taylor has ruled that the trial will begin 1 March 2004, which should give the legal teams "sufficient time to prepare for trial after having worked on this case for over three years."

I have a feeling this case is going to outlive all of us.

After a couple months' worth of budget bickering crammed into two or three hours, the Oklahoma legislature has gone home for the year.

One interesting quote, from Todd Hiett (R-Kellyville), the House minority leader: "We think at this point we have had a very successful session, partly for what we accomplished and partly for what we diverted." Sometimes, what you don't do is as important as what you do.

Yesterday afternoon was fairly nice, with temperatures hovering in the quite-reasonable middle-80s range, and I spent some of it looking over a semi-rural neighborhood that had been affected by the May storms. It's definitely odd to see a two-lane road lined with neatly-stacked dead trees. (This area is in the city limits, so I assume that a city crew will be down this week to pick up the detritus.)

One neat sign, at a small Baptist church: "Bruised but Not Broken". I'll bet no one was scared out of house and home by the twisters; people here tend to stay put.

An example at the other end of town: my father, who is 76 today and has lived in the same house for thirty-four years. You'd have to pound that house into small Lego-sized pieces for him to even think about moving.

Two survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race riots are suing The Tulsa Tribune, the Tulsa World, and the Ku Klux Klan; the lawsuit, filed in Missouri (!), claims that the Tribune "published highly inflammatory articles designed to whip up the Ku Klux Klan and the general white population."

What's interesting here, of course, is that the Tribune no longer exists; it folded in 1992 when the joint operating agreement with the World was terminated. The World is also named in the suit, but the JOA didn't exist in 1921, which means it's highly unlikely the World profited from anything the Tribune was doing. As for the Klan, well, I suppose they can subpoena Congressman Byrd from West Virginia. Me, I'm waiting for Coyote v. Acme, which to me makes much more sense.

"The time has finally come to put an end," said Terry Nichols' defense attorneys in their letter requesting that the state Supreme Court dismiss state charges against the Oklahoma City bombing conspirator, "to a prosecution that this financially strapped state cannot afford."

The Supremes declined: "This court has no power to order that a criminal prosecution be dismissed." The defense had argued that the court could assume jurisdiction, on the basis that spiraling defense costs would unfairly impact other state cases.

Justice Ralph Hodges, in his concurring opinion, smacked down this notion: "Counsel should return to the process of defending Nichols rather than focusing too narrowly on whether the defense team will be sufficiently compensated."

State Representative Richard Lerblance will take over Gene Stipe's former Senate seat; he won 55 percent of the vote in Stipe's heavily-Democratic district over Republican Jess Davis in yesterday's special election.

Of course, this means there will be another special election, to fill Lerblance's House seat.

Given Oklahoma's eternal winds and all, not too many really tall buildings are built in this state, and most of the taller ones are in Tulsa, where there used to be money.

Still, 500 feet is nothing to sneer at on the prairie, and the 32-year-old Bank One Tower, all 36 stories of it, is for sale. The building is 97 percent occupied and offers 512,000 square feet of space; the selling price is expected to exceed $25 million. If I've counted correctly, the B1T is the fifth-tallest building in the state; Tulsa's Williams Tower, at 667 feet, tops out over the others.

The Daily Oklahoman describes the Tower as "the first major downtown office property to be formerly listed since a slew of office buildings sold in 1998-2000." Actually, of course, the Tower is currently listed; it won't be formerly listed until it isn't listed any more. (I suspect they meant to say "formally".)

Bruce at This Is Class Warfare has made the rounds of the Oklahoma bloggers, and he seems to be somewhat disturbed by what he's found:

I'm fairly skeptical of government, I think, and I don't believe I've become any less so in recent months. I do have a tendency to back off from complaining in times of war, which I attribute to proper indoctrination during my Army days. :)

Still, I don't believe anyone's definition of consistency demands that if you oppose the Administration on this, you must also oppose the Administration on that; with Bush, as with Clinton, as with Bush the Elder, there have been actions I've applauded and actions I've deplored. And in my experience, the President isn't getting a free pass from conservative bloggers; they will quite willingly bash Bush if he does something that sufficiently annoys them.

I've staked out my own position pretty close to the middle. (That Political Compass thing considers me slightly left of center and distinctly anti-authoritarian.) It's not the most comfortable spot on the spectrum, but it fits. And so far, no one seems compelled to accuse me of being a Democrat.

Which I am.

Terry Nichols has asked that his pretrial hearings be moved to the county courthouse from their present location, a courtroom built in the basement of the county jail.

Holding the hearings at the jail, says counsel for Nichols, "stigmatizes Mr. Nichols and reinforces the public perception that he is a dangerous guilty offender who cannot be treated like other defendants."

Yeah. You certainly don't want anyone to reach any conclusions about a person who has already been convicted on eight counts of manslaughter.

Most states, it seems, are running in the red these days, and Oklahoma, which by law must balance its budget each year, is having the sort of problems you'd expect.

There being essentially no support for tax hikes — and how surprising is that? — the state is doing what it can. Funds for higher education were cut this year by about 9 percent, with the expected result: state tuition will be rising sharply. Smaller state schools may see increases of 15 to 20 percent; the University of Oklahoma will charge returning students 27 percent more, and incoming freshmen will be hit with a 39-percent bounce.

It could be argued, I suppose, that state tuition was underpriced to begin with, and certainly I don't have a problem with users of a service paying the costs of that service. Still, this seems like an awfully large compensation for a relatively small subsidy cut.

For the next few hours, anyway, the right-to-work law passed by referendum in Oklahoma in 2001 is unconstitutional.

What happened was this: a construction union sued an electric contractor whose workers it was expected to represent, and filed a subsequent suit requesting that the law be overturned. The latter suit got to the docket, and when the judge noted that the contractor had not responded to the suit against it, he issued an order barring enforcement of the law. The order is widely seen as temporary, and as soon as both sides have their ducks in a row, the cases will be heard and decided.

This is the small game. In the bigger game, the state Supreme Court will hear a more serious constitutional challenge to the law; a labor attempt to overturn the law got as high as the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, which dropped it back on the state. I'm not taking any bets on that one either. Philosophically, it's hard to object to right-to-work, but it's equally hard to reconcile it with laws which require that the union represent workers which aren't its members. And the proponents of State Question 695, the referendum that started it all, so preposterously oversold its benefits — one constant assertion was that a number of industrial concerns had been considering Oklahoma for plant locations but decided against it because of the lack of right-to-work, though none of the people making that assertion was ever able to name even one such firm — that it's tempting, at least to me, to hope that the law is overturned, just to see their reaction.

(Disclosure: While I am not currently in such a position, I have worked in union shops before, and have paid dues for the ostensible privilege.)

According to a radio report this morning, Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson is persuaded that most of the state's sodomy law is well and truly thrown out as a result of the Supreme Court's ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.

I said "most". The statute is vague, presumably to be as inclusive as possible; in 1935, the state's Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in Roberts v. State that the "offense consists in a carnal knowledge, committed against the order of nature, with mankind or with a beast." Lawrence says nothing about beasts, so presumably that part of the law remains intact.

And I think I'd probably better stop here.

A couple of weeks ago, Sen. Joseph Lieberman was in town to drum up support for his 2004 Presidential bid; today the state is being visited by Rep. Richard Gephardt, who promises "bold alternatives" to the policies of the Bush administration.

Gephardt finished third in the Oklahoma primary on "Super Tuesday" in 2000, a showing he attributes to running out of money too early; he was here briefly in April to sound out party leaders. Former Florida Gov. Bob Graham is due in the state next week. All this early activity, I surmise, is a result of the state's having changed its primary date from March to the first week in February, one week after New Hampshire. The real race here, of course, is for convention delegates, as it's highly unlikely that any Democrat could pick up the state's seven remaining electoral votes, down from eight in 2000.

The Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education have been hit with a discrimination charge by alumni from Langston University, an historically-black institution near Guthrie, although the alleged discrimination did not take place at Langston's main campus, but at its Tulsa facility.

The complaint alleges that other state schools, most notably Oklahoma State University, have been allowed to expand their Tulsa branches at the expense of Langston's, and that this action was intended to undercut a previous state effort to bring some measure of racial integration to Langston enrollment: while the main campus is still predominantly black, Langston Tulsa draws a substantial number of white students. The subtext, as I'm seeing it, is that the Regents expanded other schools' offerings in Tulsa in an effort to take those students away from Langston, and indeed Langston's Tulsa enrollment has dropped by half in three years.

I'm going to have to start paying closer attention to this.

And now it's Bob Graham's turn. The Senator from Florida dropped by, sounded the usual Democratic themes — usual for 2003, anyway — and pointed out that he's actually won elections in Florida, important news in case you were suffering nostalgia for 2000.

I haven't really given a whole lot of thought to Senator Graham; so far, his best selling point seems to be that he's not Dennis Kucinich. Still, I am a Democrat and will have to pick somebody in the primary, so I have some research to do, which I will of course postpone until next month.

It's called the Oklahoma Property and Casualty Insurance Guaranty Association, it's financed by an assessment on insurance companies doing business in the state, and one of its functions is to pay claims by injured workers when the firm who wrote their worker's-comp insurance fails.

What if the Association fails? And it could happen; general manager Howard Howell has reported that the Association's worker's-comp fund will run out of money some time next year, the result of more than a dozen insurance-company insolvencies since 2000 and still more on the way.

The assessment is limited to 2 percent of net premiums; rather than seek a bailout from the state's General Fund, which doesn't have a whole lot of money either, Howell is looking for an increase in the assessment, though this might make marginal insurers more so.

Part of the problem is that companies wanting a piece of Oklahoma business have a tendency to lowball introductory rates as an incentive, and then when they start losing money at those rates, they immediately jack them up, which usually encourages the policyholder to look elsewhere. This is the main reason we have had four health-insurance carriers at 42nd and Treadmill in six years. And it's not a phenomenon peculiar to Oklahoma, either; Howell says that ten, maybe twelve states, are in similarly dire straits.

I've seldom found any need to link to anything in the Tulsa World, and that's a good thing, since I can't, as Bruce explains:

In brief: tulsaworld.com is free to actual newspaper subscribers, $45 a year to the rest of the world. I will be indeed surprised if more than a handful of people have actually paid for site access.

I don't get too worked up over newspaper-site registration — I signed up for NewsOK.com (The Daily Oklahoman's joint venture with KWTV) because I don't have time to read the dead-tree edition, for the Star Tribune to read Lileks' Backfence column, for The New York Times because sometimes I need to follow up a news link, and for dallasnews.com because every once in a while I need something from the archives and they can generally fetch it on the first try — but $45 a year seems a bit stiff, especially since there are much more specialized databases on the Web which don't cost so much. Still, there aren't many alternatives in T-town: Tulsa Today suffers from hideous design, spastic writing and an erratic schedule, and the suburban papers offer even less.

Griffin Communications, which owns KWTV, also owns Tulsa's KOTV. Bruce doesn't like them either. A perfunctory look at their site suggests that there might be good reasons not to like them; for my part, I distrust any site that gives Fahrenheit temperatures to the first decimal place, like 98.4, as though the reading were obtained from a rectal thermometer. I defer to Tulsa residents on the question of where said thermometer might be inserted.

Workers cleaning pumps at the Canton, Oklahoma water department last night accidentally spilled 250 gallons of hydrochloric acid into the town's water supply.

There is no truth to the rumor that Pfizer is airlifting ten thousand rolls of Rolaids to the stricken community.

There's a very nice piece by Tom Lindley in The Sunday Oklahoman today about life in the Panhandle, a place that to most of us is "no man's land, a thin slice of hardship and desolation sandwiched between prairie and blue sky somewhere north of Amarillo."

That very hardship, though, may be an advantage to residents of the narrow three-county strip: whatever problem you throw at them, it's probably not so different from one they've already seen and already solved. Right now, the area is enjoying an influx of Latino immigration, some of it legal, as meat processing, a Hispanic stronghold for generations, continues to flourish in an otherwise-struggling economy. These people want to work, and in the Panhandle, that's a good thing; as Mayor Jess Nelson of Guymon says, "People here are hardworking people or they don't stay."

As the phrase goes, Read The Whole Thing.

Probably not — the economy still seems to be sputtering — but for the first time in two years, state revenues in Oklahoma have actually exceeded projections.

The projections have been very conservative, what with the state's budget in the tank, but the numbers are encouraging just the same; three more quarters like this and we can stash some money in the Rainy Day Fund and shave a quarter-point off the state income tax.

It's called the Oklahoma Tobacco Helpline, and it's intended to provide assistance to those who want to quit the evil weed. (I somehow doubt that they'd have anything useful to say to someone who wanted to start.) To no one's surprise, this service has a telephone number that spells something: in this case, it's (866) PITCH EM.

The cost of the Helpline, we are told, will be paid from the interest earned on the state's cut of the tobacco settlement. As a nonsmoker since Day One, I doubt I'll have any reason to talk to these folks, but it should be interesting to see how (if?) it works.

The "No Child Left Behind" legislation mandates that each state prepare a list of low-performing schools each year. Oklahoma's list was issued yesterday and contains 51 schools (of about 1800), including eleven in the Tulsa district and eleven more in the Oklahoma City district. (The OKC list technically includes 14 schools, but three of them were closed after last school year.) There were 30 schools on last year's list; thirteen schools have been on the list for four years and theoretically could be closed if there is no improvement in year five.

The Oklahoma City district will send a report to parents of students in those eleven underperforming schools next week; parents wishing to have their students transferred to another school must file a request before 2 September.

A letter to Governor Henry from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (remember them?) has asked that the annual "Outlaw" Rodeo at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester be canceled, claiming it encourages criminals to torment and abuse animals.

The governor's spokesperson called the request "silly," and said that the rodeo would go on as scheduled next Friday and Saturday.

Bruce sees a future where cities here on the Lone Prairie are tied together much like the BosWash corridor back East:

I think a Tulsa/Oklahoma City train could be doable; Amtrak already has service of a sort in Oklahoma City, there's plenty of traffic between the two towns, and the distance is only about 100 miles, about the same as Baltimore to Philadelphia. And at the moment, Oklahoma City has better event facilities, so it's conceivable that Tulsans might come down en masse. But not a lot of people take the train south of here to Dallas, and how many people are likely to come down from Kansas City?

We'll never be BosWash, simply because the distances out here are too great. And that will have to be one heck of a fast train to beat my 5:10 time to Kansas City. What's more, Southwest often offers a $39 (!) air fare to Kansas City, which the train would be hard-pressed to match. (There is, of course, the fact that KCI is practically halfway to Des Moines and therefore you'll have to rely on ground transportation in the opposite direction to see anything, which offsets the fare bargain to some extent.)

Still, it's a long-term plan, and there are other factors at work, as Bruce notes:

I can buy that, I think. But all else being equal, I'll probably still drive, if only because I actually enjoy it.

In the wake of Columbine, the Oklahoma legislature passed this measure intended to prevent such things. It is written as broadly as possible; in fact, it is so broad that it doesn't even require that intent be proven — only that someone perceive a threat, real or imagined.

Remember that word: imagined.

And if you're thinking "It can't happen here," think again.

(Muchas gracias: Matt Deatherage.)

The way things work in Oklahoma is sometimes a source of wonderment.

In its spring session, the legislature passed both HB 1278, which authorizes the state lottery and directs the governor to call an election for its ratification by the voters, and SJR 22, which directs the governor to call an election to amend the state constitution to allow for, well, HB 1278.

The trick here is that SJR 22 didn't get a two-thirds vote, which means that the governor can't call a special election, which means that the constitutional amendment must be on a general-election ballot, scheduled for November 2004. Governor Henry insists that both measures must be on the same ballot; legislative Republicans are now claiming that Henry could call a special election for the lottery alone, and that he is practicing the politics of delay; inevitably, both sides have begun sniping at one another.

In this case, I'm inclined to side with the governor, who at least has been consistent on this issue; the GOP's complaints, I suspect, are motivated by the desire to kill the lottery before they catch flak from their right flank.

Attorney General Drew Edmondson made it official last night: the state has filed suit against the bankrupt telecommunications firm and six of its officers, charging that The Company Formerly And Now Once Again Known As MCI faked stock and bond information, ultimately costing the state some $64 million in pension funding.

Edmondson thinks other states may follow Oklahoma's lead. Conviction on any of the 15 counts filed against each defendant could result in ten years' imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. A representative for former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers pointed out that the Feds found no evidence on which they could charge Ebbers.

I think ultimately the state will reach a settlement with the company and the bankruptcy court, but for now, it's way too early to be sure.

In 1980, Don Nickles opined that term limits would be useful, and certainly no one should serve more than two terms — twelve years — in the US Senate. Voters may or may not have agreed with this particular premise, but enough of them embraced Nickles to propel him to a win in that year's Senate race, and a repeat win in 1986.

And then, apparently forgetting what he'd said, he ran again in 1992 and 1998. He won easily, so it must be assumed that the electorate either didn't remember or didn't hold it against him. Recently departed Congressman J. C. Watts reneged on a similar pledge and still was reelected, which suggests the latter.

Now comes the 2004 election, and rumors are floating that Nickles may step down. I'm not sure what I think about this: he's not my favorite Oklahoma politician by any stretch of the imagination, but Don Nickles is a veritable Renaissance Man next to his junior counterpart, the venal and insipid Jim Inhofe, and I'd hate to see him go if he's going to be replaced by the likes of Tom Cole or (gag) Ernest Istook.

Which brings up the next question: Will J. C. Watts come out of retirement? The Bush administration seems fond of the fellow.

Oh, the Democrats? Yeah, they'll nominate some sacrificial lamb to go through the motions. As OkieDoke's Mike points out:

I don't expect the economy to be in great shape next year — the sheer weight of federal borrowing to cover the nearly half-trillion-dollar deficit will see to that — but it won't be Hooverville either, and somehow it's hard to imagine any of the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates making the slightest bit of impact on the Oklahoma electorate.

A couple of days ago, I speculated as to what might happen should Senator Don Nickles choose not to run for another term in 2004. (If Nickles does run, of course, he'll win easily.) At the time, I suggested that there might be relatively little Democratic interest in the seat, given the paucity of Democrats with statewide recognition these days. OkieDoke.com's Mike pointed out in comments that I perhaps had overlooked Attorney General Drew Edmondson, who certainly qualified as having statewide recognition; I retorted that he might want to keep a lower profile, what with some heavy litigation going on.

Now comes this piece in The Daily Oklahoman, in which Edmondson says that open Senate seats don't come along too often and he'd simply have to look at the possibilities. Advantage: Mike. :)

Brad Carson, just barely in place as Second District Congressman, is also giving the matter some thought. And surprisingly (to me anyway), Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys (a non-partisan post, but Humphreys is a Republican in real life) is making some serious noise himself, even going so far as to rule out a run for the House before trying to move up to the Senate. That sort of slow, steady progress, he says, "is for very young, very patient people. I am neither." At least he didn't say "That's the way we do it in the O.K.C., bitch."

And most telling of all, Nickles has apparently thrown cold water on Ernest Istook, telling him that the state would be better off if Istook kept his Fifth District House seat rather than jump into a Senate race. Istook, of course, disagrees. For myself, I have always felt that the distance between Istook and the nearest clue was variable but never came close to approaching zero, and if Don Nickles, who keeps a closer watch on him than I do, is similarly persuaded — and I haven't heard that Nickles gave any such advice to the other three GOP Congressmen in the state — well, I might actually miss ol' Don when he goes. Whenever that may be.

In an effort to save a few bucks, the Oklahoma Tax Commission announced that they would no longer send renewal notices for vehicle license plates (or, as state parlance calls them, "tags").

Today the Commission backpedaled, saying that they weren't saving any real money by not sending the notices. State law provides for a thirty-day grace period after the expiration of the current tag; the Commission had hoped that people, knowing they would get no reminder in the mail, might actually renew on time or even early. It didn't happen.

(I myself used to procrastinate, though I never seem to find the time anymore.)

Embattled WorldCom boss Bernard J. Ebbers will appear in Oklahoma County District Court today to answer the charges filed against him by Attorney General Drew Edmondson last week. For some reason, Edmondson himself will not appear.

Reid Weingarten, counsel for Ebbers, has already indicated which way he plans to go with this matter:

Edmondson has come under fire from federal prosecutors and financial analysts for taking this action, a matter to which he is utterly indifferent:

Given his track record, he probably doesn't have to.

Defrocked WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers won't be fitted for an orange jumpsuit just yet; he entered a Not Guilty plea to the state's fifteen charges, posted $50,000 bond, and got out of town.

Should Ebbers be convicted on any one count, he faces up to ten years in Big Mac and a $10,000 fine. He is due back in the Okay City for a preliminary hearing on 30 October.

I don't know if you'd call it a personal epiphany, but Mark Fuhrman, the detective who turned up the bloody glove in the O. J. Simpson case, has apparently turned his back on the death penalty; in Death and Justice: An Exposé of Oklahoma's Death Row Machine, Fuhrman, writing with Stephen Weeks, rakes various Oklahoma prosecutorial types, including retired Oklahoma County DA Bob Macy and disgraced forensic chemist Joyce Gilchrist, over the coals.

"Catastrophic errors," says Fuhrman, "occur in many death penalty cases because of the pressure to make a strong case and get a capital conviction." And I suppose if anyone knows about catastrophic errors, it would be Fuhrman. But to err is human; to design the evidence to fit the suspect is monstrous. And some of what went on in Oklahoma County during the Macy years is truly the work of monsters. This book goes on my Must-Read list.

(Update, 12:20 pm: The Bubba World archive of "Junk Justice" may well be of interest here.)

The Federal trials of Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were held, not in Oklahoma City, but in Denver. Nichols, now facing state charges, has asked that the state trial be moved out of Oklahoma; Judge Steven Taylor has rejected that request, though he said that if the court cannot find enough impartial jurors, the case will be dismissed.

The trial location is expected to be announced Monday; the trial itself begins on the first of March.

For years and years, Tulsa has thought of itself as Oklahoma's Dallas, and that other city down 66 was Fort Worth, nothing more. Tulsa has had better convention facilities, a spiffier downtown, more hotel rooms — and today none of it matters, as a refurbished Oklahoma City shoots for the big time and Tulsa descends into tedious Lubbockhood.

Today, voters will pass judgment on a package of expensive civic improvements and industrial incentives intended to restore Tulsa's edge. The operative word here is "expensive": Vision 2025, as it's called, will cost nearly a billion dollars and will be financed by an extra penny of sales tax over a 13-year period.

There are some objections to the package — a downtown stadium? — but I think it will pass, if only because Oklahoma's number two city hates to be, well, number two. Still, it's not as visionary, if that's the word, as the MAPS projects in Oklahoma City, and there are legitimate reasons to question whether Tulsans will get any kind of return on their investment.

Right now, though, the one question is "What will the voters say?" That, at least, will be answered today.

The Justice Department has ordered Tulsa's Rx Depot, which operates 85 pharmacies in six states, to shut down by Thursday or face the Wrath of Ashcroft. The chain does a thriving business on the side importing prescription drugs from Canada, and following a warning from DOJ this past spring, actually expanded its activities. Further, the Food and Drug Administration says it bought an antidepressant from Rx Depot at Canadian prices which proved to be a counterfeit.

Rx Depot's Carl Moore continues to insist that he will not yield to government pressure, and that he will not sign the DOJ's consent decree.

In the end, it wasn't even close: all four of Tulsa's Vision 2025 proposals passed, drawing 60 percent approval from the 40 percent of registered voters who turned out for Tuesday's election.

"It is the beginning of Tulsa's future," exulted Mayor Bill LaFortune.

Well, maybe. I'm not convinced waving $350 million at Boeing will encourage them to build the 7E7 in Tulsa; on the other hand, $22 million to help shore up sagging American Airlines, which wants to close one of its three maintenance facilities, one of which is in Tulsa, might do some good.

And there's the question of whether some Tulsans felt they were being railroaded into supporting Vision 2025. Michael Bates, a leader of the opposition forces, reports:

A lot of this goes on in most elections of this sort, I suspect.

Now comes the hard part: trying to get the maximum bang for Tulsa County's extra cent per buck.

The first blast came at 5:14, and I sleepily did the math: yes, it's the 11th of September, and yes, I'm within five miles of Tinker Air Force Base, and yes, if they take out Tinker, there's a good chance I'm going with it.

A second eruption, the lights flickered, and finally it dawned on me that this was not any kind of military operation at all; it was nothing more than a very loud but otherwise unremarkable Oklahoma thunderstorm.

A bit of paranoia, I think, is probably hard-coded into the genome as a survival enhancement.

Incidentally, this site was hit with a Denial of Service attack last evening. (Well, not just this site — everything on the host was being hit — but there are relatively few blogs on this host, so you might not have noticed it elsewhere.) The attack was brought under control after about twenty-five minutes, but it's yet another reminder that we all have our little vulnerabilities.

Carolyne Duncan teaches literature at Haskell Middle School in Broken Arrow. Sometimes she teaches something more.

Last year, her seventh-graders read Paul Fleischman's Seedfolks and constructed two quilts, which ultimately wound up at Comfort Quilts. What is Comfort Quilts?

Cody Taylor, a student who participated in the project last year:

There's no feeling on earth quite like it.

"No public speech will be allowed on the bus, which may include but is not necessarily limited to religion, politics, economics or finances."

This used to be the policy in Broken Arrow, which operates one bus. The American Center for Law and Justice filed suit against the city on behalf of two local women. At the time, the city had contracted out its bus service to a private firm; the city began providing the service itself on the first of September, dropped the policy, and settled the ACLJ suit.

The new policy permits any discussion so long as it does not disturb the passengers or the driver.

The seal of the city of Edmond, Oklahoma, designed by local resident Frances Bryan, was adopted in 1965. In 1992, Rev. Wayne Robinson asked that the cross at three o'clock be removed, claiming that it showed government endorsement of religion; the city declined. Lawsuits ensued, the city lost, and to this day, the seal is displayed with the cross area blanked out.

Now comes a similar story, across the state in McAlester. At the 26 August city council meeting, firefighter Steven Belcher registered a complaint about the city seal, which contains an image of a church topped by a cross, though the complaint didn't seem to be about the cross so much as it was about the city's alleged behavior:

There has been no further statement from Belcher, and no formal request to remove the symbol has been filed, but McAlester city officials are busy working up Plan B, just in case; the current estimate for removing the ostensibly-offending symbol is $156,000.

Generally, I tend to want to keep the church and the state at arm's length, both from each other and from me. On the other hand, the blithe assumption that the Wall of Separation requires every last symbol of faith be expunged from public view is becoming increasingly annoying, and the argument that the appearance of an icon represents an endorsement strikes me as specious. The Edmond seal contains a covered wagon, which commemorates the 1889 Land Run; are native Americans going to sue the city on the basis that the city endorses white settlements on native lands? Will environmentalists condemn the McAlester seal, which includes an image of a coal miner's hat, for promoting fossil-fuel use?

Enough already.

Usually when I see tidy young people clustered at an intersection, I assume they're conducting a charity car wash. This made no sense at the northwest corner of Pennsylvania and the Northwest Distressway today, since (1) there's already a car wash there, on the southwest corner, and (2) even slowing down through this intersection is a good way to get killed.

Fortunately, I can read fairly quickly, and the signs this bunch was carrying didn't offer to scrub the crud off my car; they were trying to drum up support for Democratic Presidential candidate Howard Dean. Inasmuch as the 2004 primary in this state is fairly early — 3 February, the week after New Hampshire — I suppose that it's not too early for this sort of thing, but I question their location: just east of this intersection are the two swankiest (by Oklahoma City standards, anyway) enclosed retail compounds in town, the sort of place where you'd think there'd be little support for a rustic Vermonter, especially a leftish rustic Vermonter. Then again, the Democratic party tends to rely more on high-dollar donors than does the GOP.

I remembered posting this in '01, and it seems to fit the current climate.

If you're planning to visit Oklahoma, you've still got a few days left.

Oklahoma is a small state, at least in terms of population, but it's big enough for things to happen under the radar, and I had no idea that this was going on until The Daily Oklahoman had editorial praise for it this morning.

Under a pilot program in the state's two largest counties, prescription drugs which go unused in area nursing homes, which ordinarily would be destroyed after one week, are sent to the county, which then distributes them to the needy.

The program covers 25 specific medications supplied in point-of-care packaging (individual dosages, not bulk). Nursing homes normally don't stock them in surplus quantities, but prescriptions can and do change, and patients eventually pass away, so it's not uncommon for there to be leftover drugs, and before this program was instituted, the drugs were simply thrown away. The Food and Drug Administration doesn't object to the recycling so long as adequate controls are maintained and the original point-of-care packaging is retained.

Waste not, want not: it's on page one of the Oklahoma catalog of virtues. I'm rather pleased that the legislature came up with something like this.

A couple of days ago I posted a bit about the squabbling between the two Seattle dailies and the Joint Operating Agreement that, for now anyway, binds them together. Incorporated therein was a reference to the JOA between the Tulsa World and the now-departed Tulsa Tribune, about which I wrote in Vent #317.

Tribune fan Michael Bates remembers the Tulsa JOA and its unraveling in the early 90s, and given the Tribune's penchant for innovation, he wonders if the paper might have survived without actual, well, paper:

And probably without charging $45 a year for everything but the classifieds and the static displays, as tulsaworld.com does now.

Oklahoma City was never affected by the Newspaper Preservation Act; by the Fifties, the surviving OKC papers — The Daily Oklahoman and the Oklahoma City Times — were both owned by the Oklahoma Publishing Company. In 1964, Midwest City founder W. P. Bill Atkinson, always at odds with OPUBCO's E. K. Gaylord, started a rival morning paper, The Oklahoma Journal, and positioned it as Fair and Balanced; the Journal's slogan was "The Paper That Tells Both Sides".

The Journal seldom outsold the Times and never came close to the Oklahoman, but it held on until 1980 — Atkinson had sold out a couple of years earlier — and its death was noted tersely by the Oklahoman on the last page of Section A, under the headline "Midwest City paper folds". And the Times, like many afternoon papers, was eventually absorbed into its morning counterpart.

While there is little local newspaper competition, the national players — USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times — are happy to play at this level, and The Dallas Morning News has a substantial presence here. Suburban papers like the Norman Transcript and the Edmond Sun are staying alive. But head-to-head competition in a single market, even outside Oklahoma, is all but dead; only a dozen or so JOAs remain, and even fewer cities have newspaper rivals who don't pool their resources.

I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that we're technically no worse off than most of the rest of the country, but still I lament the death of direct competition: it's what keeps a news organization on its toes.

A lesson CNN, for one, is only just now starting to learn.

And now, the recipe for Honey Pecan Ice Cream, the very recipe that won the blue ribbon at the Oklahoma State Fair this past month:

Winning recipe by Rosalie Seebeck, Bethany, Oklahoma.

And here's what she beat to get that blue ribbon.

I reported here in June about a lawsuit filed against two Tulsa newspapers, one of which is defunct, which claimed that The Tulsa Tribune had published inflammatory material which incited the 1921 riot on Tulsa's largely-black north side.

The suit, filed by two survivors of the riot, has now been dropped; the plaintiffs gave no reason for requesting the dismissal.

Meanwhile, an unrelated suit filed in February against the state of Oklahoma and the city of Tulsa is pending in federal court, charging conspiracy to incite the riot.

A petition has been approved to initiate a grand jury investigation of Commissioner of Labor Brenda Reneau Wynn and Oklahoma County District Attorney Wes Lane; supporters of the investigation must now obtain 5000 signatures of residents to have the jury officially empaneled.

The petition charges that Reneau Wynn circumvented the state's competitive-bidding process, advised others how to get around the state's campaign laws, and conducted campaign affairs on state time. Lane is accused of taking a campaign contribution from Reneau Wynn under dubious circumstances, and of fudging evidence in the infamous Donald Pete case.

There have been rumors floating around, but today Senator Don Nickles made it official: his fourth term will be his last.

"Knowing when to leave," said Burt Bacharach and/or Hal David, "may be the smartest thing anyone can learn." Nickles is a smart fellow; I don't know what, if any, handwriting he may have seen on the wall, but I'm betting he's figured this one out to the last detail.

And now with a Senate seat opening up in 2004 — we're in for some bumpy times, folks.

Today the Department of Justice is seeking an injunction against Tulsa-based Rx Depot, a company used by thousands of consumers to import prescription drugs from Canada and elsewhere. Rx Depot's Oklahoma locations were closed by an earlier action; DOJ wants the remaining 77 stores in 26 states to shut down.

Inasmuch as the FDA does not inspect Canadian drugs, the DOJ's request is likely to rely heavily on safety concerns. Rx Depot counsel Fred Stoops scoffs: "It's not like we're buying these drugs from Afghanistan."

Even if the DOJ prevails, there will still be sources for Canadian drugs. Can the process be stopped at all? Robert Prather takes the long view:

The best possible outcome?

A push toward freer markets in those other countries? Certainly a boon, but probably not a likely prospect.

The Hill (no relation) is reporting that Rep. Brad Carson, of Oklahoma's 2nd Congressional District, will seek the Senate seat to be vacated by Don Nickles, who has announced he will not run for a fifth term. Carson, a Democrat, is serving his second term in the House.

One likely Republican opponent, though he hasn't declared his candidacy yet, is Rep. Ernest Istook of the 5th District. Others reputedly waiting in the wings are Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys, a Republican serving in a nonpartisan office, and Attorney General Drew Edmondson, a Democrat.

For the GOP, this means a change from a seat that was safe to a seat that is...um, less safe. Were I a Democratic party operative, I wouldn't be ordering any champagne just yet.

No way anyone will recall Oklahoma's governor, Brad Henry:

Mike from OkieDoke, from whom I pilfered this story, comments:

They'd have to hire someone just to follow Carroll Fisher around.

Vice President Dick Cheney is just now wrapping up his fundraiser at Civic Center Music Hall in Oklahoma City.

Now let's see: if Cheney sold out the place at $1000 a head — not at all unthinkable — that's $2.5 million before expenses.

Not a bad haul for a day's work, if I do say so myself.

On Day Two of the hearing in federal court in Tulsa, Judge Claire Eagan did not issue the injunction against Rx Depot requested by the Department of Justice, leaving the pharmaceutical importer free to operate through the end of the month. Judge Eagan said that on the 31st, she will receive supporting evidence from both DOJ and Rx Depot president Carl Moore.

Rep. Ernest Istook says he's not going to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Don Nickles next year.

Announcing he will seek reelection to his 5th District House seat, Istook cited the slight majorities held by the Republicans in Congress; he's not willing to risk the GOP House majority to take a shot at securing the Senate.

With J. C. Watts already having declined, this leaves the door open for Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys, who has a press conference scheduled for this afternoon. (Should Humphreys win the seat, the City Council would appoint an acting mayor until a special election could be called; a city charter change is on the ballot tomorrow to allow a special election immediately.)

As for the Democrats, well, Brad Carson is definitely in, and Drew Edmondson is surely thinking about it.

A parent with a child in a Tulsa school got this explanation of what's going on in the classroom:

Um, yeah. Okay. Whatever you say.

Now what, exactly, does all this have to do with teaching French?

I can appreciate the idea of avoiding rote memorization, but in a foreign language for which total immersion is impracticable, there is really no choice but to learn all those irregular verbs and such.

Michael Bates, who brought this to light, comments:

Meanwhile, the school board, having been thwarted at every turn by the presence of trees, has rewritten the curriculum to avoid any mention of the forest.

"Theme for the year," indeed.

Bruce has a four-point plan for Brad Carson, 2nd District Congressman seeking to replace the retiring Don Nickles in the Senate, and it goes like this:

"You do these things," says Bruce, "and you can spit in the face of everybody you meet in Oklahoma and they'll still vote for you."

As an Oklahoma Democrat, I advise against item 1. :)

Elijah, if you're wondering, is the son of Dan and Angi Lovejoy, Oklahoma bloggers, and the story of how he got here is the stuff of legend, with perhaps the occasional miracle.

If you want to read that story, it's not exactly organized into neat little segments, but this is a good place to start.

Attorney General Drew Edmondson, defying early predictions, said today he would not run for Don Nickles' Senate seat in 2004.

With State Treasurer Robert Butkin also passing up the race, this leaves Congressman Brad Carson as the only Democrat in the running; the first avowed Republican candidate is soon-to-be-former Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys.

I can't wait to see what Mike at Okiedoke has to say about this.

(Update, 9 pm: Chris thinks Butkin and Edmondson basically "wimped out.")

In Frosty Troy's Oklahoma Observer (not online), a cover story about retiring Senator Don Nickles: Requiem for a Lightweight.

This morning's convocation of the crows took place as scheduled, but for some reason it was more noticeable than usual, and after a couple of thwaps to the forehead it occurred to me why: it's actually daylight as I'm pushing out the door. With the return of standard time comes a brief period (a month or so) when I don't have to commute in the dark. The birds, of course, don't pay attention to these fine points of human existence: they just wait for a propitious moment to divebomb the cars in the parking lot. Meanwhile, I'm feeling this strange notion that maybe I overdid the fall-back bit, that I'm actually late.

Right on cue, the stereo pops up "Get Me To The World On Time", the second Electric Prunes hit. (If you think of the Prunes as one-hit wonders, well, think again.) And ultimately I was on time, though my sense of timing wasn't keen enough to let me sail through any of the intervening traffic lights.

I don't live in Oklahoma City (though I will be moving there shortly), so I never bothered to work up much of an opinion about Mayor Kirk Humphreys; he struck me as a reasonable, if not particularly inspired, successor to Ron Norick, a visionary who was a hard act to follow.

No doubt Humphreys has his fans. But some folks don't like him at all.

(Via Fly Over Country, now endorsed by Robb Hibbard.)

Well, actually, you didn't, which is why Sallisaw's Blue Ribbon Downs, the state's first pari-mutuel racetrack, was scheduled to be auctioned off tomorrow, only to be rescued at the last minute by the Choctaw Nation, which also owns a casino in nearby Pocola.

Terms of the sale were not announced. Speculation continues that Remington Park in Oklahoma City, the state's largest racetrack, may be in deep trouble as well; the general feeling seems to be that the casinos are drawing many potential bettors away from the tracks. I stay away from the tracks, but this is mostly because I coughed up quite a bit of cash playing the ponies in my younger days and I have no reason to think I'm any better at it now than I was then.

I've mentioned before that I'm moving into one of Oklahoma City's Urban Conservation Districts, and that while some of the zoning restrictions therein might seem daunting, they were enacted at the request of a majority of the property owners therein, and, well, if I found them particularly onerous, perhaps I should have bought somewhere else.

Do districts of this sort, which in effect empower individual neighborhoods, threaten the status quo? Michael Bates certainly thinks so:

There are, of course, numerous examples where individual property owners have been given the back of the municipal hand, often to expedite the plans of politically-connected developers; the right of "eminent domain" is often abused. I don't know how well our little strip of the city will serve as any sort of bulwark, but it's a good thing that Oklahoma City is, at least for now, on our side — and it's not so good that Tulsa's movers and shakers think so little of their residents.

The government has prevailed in its efforts to shut down Rx Depot; Judge Claire Egan granted the request by the Department of Justice to close the Tulsa firm that imports lower-priced Canadian drugs for American consumers.

From Egan's ruling:

The pharmaceutical industry's business model — lose money in countries like Canada with artificial price controls, make it up in the US where the market is freer — makes a certain amount of sense. This ruling is going to be perceived, however, as yet another instance of Sticking It to the Little Guy, and as a result we're going to move one step closer to nationalized health care, which will likely stick it to everyone.

According to Assessor Mike Means, home values rose 17.6 percent in Oklahoma County last year, the sort of number one associates with health-care costs or the late, lamented Oil Boom.

Mercifully, state law provides that property taxes cannot rise more than 5 percent in a single year.

And this provides more justification for buying in now before things get really out of hand. I don't see things reaching the heady heights of, say, Austin, where fairly ordinary boxes just north of the University are now going for more than a quarter of a million, but I'll happily take whatever equity I can get.

The increase in beef prices does more than just make your burgers more costly: it also brings an increase in cattle rustling.

With prices now topping $120 per hundredweight, it's becoming more cost-effective to steal a steer. And it doesn't necessarily require the thief to jump the fence, either; even cattle rustling has gone sort of high-tech.

Of course, we still have cottonwood trees and ropes to stretch, should the circumstances warrant.

Rep. Brad Carson (D-OK) came down with a severe case of abdominal pain last night and has checked into St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, where they're planning to remove his gall bladder tonight.

Of course, Congress never runs short of gall, so this should be considered relatively minor in the grand scheme of things.

I'm waiting for someone (maybe Bruce) to ask how much of a copay Carson had to fork over.

So, Mr. Insurance Commissioner, this year you've been caught accepting high-lux gifts from someone within your regulatory purview, you've been busted for DWI, and you've used your influence to dig up dirt on an opponent. What are you going to do now?

You're running for the Senate, you say?

Sheesh.

Lindsay's dad has been wanting a Translinear Greek New Testament, which is how she came to be contemplating the Oklahoma phenomenon that is Mardel:

I've never felt too out of place at Mardel — they were the last place in town who stocked label tape for my ancient Dymo, which was reason enough to go there — but I look like basically the same shambling small-h hulk all the time, so it's not like I can do much of anything to disguise myself when approaching those sanitary surroundings. Besides, not having to cater to more secular souls makes their Christmas-card selection vastly more interesting than what you'll find at Wal-Mart, a place that gives me far more heebie-jeebies than Mardel ever did.

Tulsa's Rx Depot, shuttered by a district judge's ruling, has asked the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay of that ruling.

On 6 November, Judge Claire Egan ordered the company to close at the request of the Department of Justice for importing drugs from Canada and elsewhere. Counsel for Rx Depot argued that the firm is not in fact an importer of Canadian drugs, but merely facilitates the process for its customers.

Dan Lovejoy admits that he voted for Carroll Fisher, and summarizes the headlines made by our beloved Insurance Commissioner over the past year and a half.

Disclosure: Even I voted for the guy. But his apparent meltdown is incredible, even by Oklahoma standards. He doesn't really have a shot at that Senate seat; there is, contrary to the dicta of the entertainment industry, such a thing as negative name recognition.

Robert Braver in Norman has been fighting unsolicited crapola for a long time. On his Web site, in fact, he characterizes telemarketers and senders of junk fax as "a form of organized crime," and he's happy to take on this mob in the courts.

So it's no surprise to see Braver suing spammers (NewsOK.com registration required: email cgh at windowphobe.com, pw carlotta) under the Oklahoma law which went into effect last month. The statute outlaws fake routing information or bogus email addresses, and specifies a format for unsolicited email which must be followed explicitly. Said Braver:

Personally, I'd rather see them crucified, but whatever works, right?

Record high temperature for the date yesterday, so naturally we're waiting for the snow to start.

And we may as well wait, because we've had no power at 42nd and Treadmill for an hour and a half.

(Update, 3:30 pm: Which stretched into two hours and fifty-five minutes before the juice was restored.)

Oklahoma's term-limits law, enacted as State Question 632 in 1990, allows a legislator a maximum of twelve years, whether in the state House, the state Senate, or both. The law specified that legislators serving as of January 1991 would be allowed to complete their current term before their 12-year clock would be started.

Which means that individuals who were serving in the subsequent legislature — 1993-94 — are now about to be squeezed out, and the first squeezee looks like Senator Angela Z. Monson, Oklahoma City Democrat, who began her career in the Senate in 1993 but who previously served one term in the House. (Disclosure: I used to live in Monson's district, and voted for her twice. Not in the same election.) The law says that Monson's clock starts with the beginning of her Senate service, which means that although she was elected to a full four-year term in 2002, she will have to leave the Senate in 2005.

One other Senator may face a similar situation: Jim Maddox, a Lawton Democrat, who was in the House when his clock started in 1993 but moved to the Senate for the 1995 session. The difference, so far, is that the Attorney General has been asked to rule on Monson, not on Maddox.

It's official: Boeing will build the new 7E7 jet in Everett, Washington, snubbing a bid from Tulsa.

Michael Bates is still wondering about the incentives Tulsa offered:

Tulsa officials, says Bates, are in "full spin mode." Meanwhile, I keep thinking of the United Airlines maintenance facility for which we were competing, which finally ended up in Indianapolis, only to be shut down when United went into Chapter 11, and I don't feel quite so bad.

In 1996, the state Constitution was amended to block property-tax increases for persons 65 and over with incomes of $25,000 or less. (Technically, the law blocks increasing the assessed valuation of the property, on which the tax is based; it does not actually freeze the tax rate, which is generally set by voter election.)

There is now a proposal in the works, backed by members of the County Government Legislative Council, to amend this amendment by allowing the income threshold to float upward to the median income in each county, which even in the state's poorest county (Pushmataha) is today over $30,000. In my neck of the woods, the cutoff would be $51,100.

Roy Bishop, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, announced that the group would oppose any move that might conceivably take any money out of school coffers. In 2002, nearly $3 of every $5 collected by Oklahoma County went to public schools.

The income-tax law in Oklahoma has an interesting quirk: if the State Equalization Board, after reviewing budgets and projections and such, certifies that the state's revenues will increase for the next calendar year, the tax rate must be cut to compensate.

The Board has so certified for 2004, so next year's tax rate will be reduced; the top rate, now 7 percent, will drop to 6.65 percent. Lower brackets are not affected, but considering how fast those brackets go by — a single person reaches the top rate with a taxable income of $10,000 — this really isn't the sop to the rich that you might think. (The Bureau of the Census guesstimates the per capita income for 2002, the latest figures I found, to be $25,575.) Still, it would seem fairer to reduce all the brackets.

Kevin Wyckoff, newly arrived at the state correctional facility in Lexington, was found dead in his cell, a noose around his neck. The family was notified and a funeral was held for the deceased prisoner.

Who then called home from the facility.

Officials are still scrambling to assemble the story, but it appears that Wyckoff and prisoner Steven Howe swapped cells at Lexington's reception center, and it was apparently Howe who hanged himself. The two men reputedly looked enough alike that no one noticed the switch, though it seems implausible that Wyckoff's family wouldn't have caught the error at the services.

Corrections staff are now seeking a court order to exhume whoever it was got buried in Wyckoff's plot.

Oklahoma State University, like many schools, offers a degree in hotel and restaurant administration. Unlike many schools, O-State has its own hotel.

And after a year of renovations and upgrades, the hotel, originally built in the 1950s, is ready to resume its status as the "Waldorf of the West." (Be prepared to pay extra on weekends when the Pokes have a home football game.)

Oklahoma state tax brackets, except for the very top, have not been adjusted for twenty years. Senate Bill 859, introduced by Randy Brogdon, an Owasso Republican, would provide an inflation adjustment for those brackets equal to the increase in the Consumer Price Index.

Brogdon describes the bill as a "baby step", suggesting he has other ideas to patch up the tax code. If he hasn't already thought about it, I'd like to propose that he do something about the standard deduction, which has never kept up with the federal standard deduction, let alone the rate of inflation: it's 15 percent of adjusted gross income, with a minimum of $1000 and a maximum of $2000. (I hasten to point out that I will not personally benefit from this change, inasmuch as I will be itemizing deductions beginning in tax year 2004.)

Neighborhood Association meeting tonight, and a better turnout than last month, but "It's only a block or so, I'll walk" makes a lot more sense when the temperature is above freezing, something it hasn't been since midday Sunday and probably won't be again until Wednesday noon.

Michael Bates, a couple of weeks ago, decried a plan by the University of Tulsa to, in his words, "replace another Route 66 landmark with empty space." The University's favored tool is the power of eminent domain, as wielded by the City of Tulsa on the school's behalf:

Meanwhile, there's an effort in Colorado to curb this sort of thing. A bill being introduced into the Colorado legislature this week by Rep. Shawn Mitchell (R-Broomfield) would bar the use of eminent domain for private projects:

The Colorado Municipal League [link requires Adobe Reader], for its part, "opposes state and federal actions interfering with municipal authority concerning land use regulations." Of course they do.

That's what Wesley Clark's campaign people are saying, citing a new poll in Oklahoma that shows the general trailing Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean by a mere three percentage points, within the predicted margin of error. (Joe Lieberman is a distant third; the others don't matter.)

The Oklahoma primary is 3 February. I've scheduled a dental appointment for that date in anticipation. Registration closes this afternoon.

Marietta, Oklahoma is known for basically one thing: cookies.

This week, no cookies: Bake-Line Group, the national baking conglomerate founded by former Keebler officers, Marietta's largest employer, has closed all seven of its bakeries and announced plans to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

About 300 people out of Marietta's population of 2300 worked for Bake-Line.

Is it just me, or is Mike suffering brain freeze?

These days, it is an article of faith — one might even call it a faith-based article — that academics of a conservative bent are this close to being on the Endangered Species List, and that the leftists in charge would be gleeful at the possibility of their extinction.

As with most stereotypes, there's a kernel of truth somewhere within, and the example I know best comes from right here in Soonerland, where Professor David Deming of the University of Oklahoma, who has run afoul of the Forces of Political Correctness before, claimed on KWTV this week that his academic career has been stymied by higher-ups who object to his manifest conservatism. (There is, at least temporarily, a RealPlayer video clip at NewsOK.com.)

Dr Deming last galvanized the opposition against him in 2000, when a Yale Daily News piece by student Joni Kletter was reprinted locally. Kletter argued that "easy access to a handgun allows everyone in this country...to quickly and easily kill as many random people as they want." Deming sent a letter to the Oklahoma Daily, suggesting that similarly, women in general and Kletter in particular have the capacity, because of "easy access" to sexual equipment, to have sex with random people — and that he hoped Kletter was "as responsible with her equipment as most gun owners are with theirs."

Not the most subtle of analogies, but Deming made his point, and was duly punished for it. A couple of dozen complaints were filed with the University's Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action. The University, seeing it as a First Amendment issue, dismissed the complaints. The complainants appealed the dismissal, and the University scheduled a hearing; under pressure from local media and from the Center for Individual Rights, which was preparing to sue the University on Deming's behalf, the charges were dropped once again. It seems reasonable to believe, though, that there are still people seething over the fact that Deming is still teaching at OU.

Dr John Dean, then dean of the College of Geophysics, had written Deming over the Kletter affair, to this effect:

Dr Dean is still Deming's boss.

(Update, 18 January, 8 pm: Deming says he has lost a class and has been banished to a basement office.)

We do love a parade on the Lone Prairie. Last year, over 40,000 turned out to celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday; only Houston's MLK parade drew a bigger crowd. And while there's a certain irony in the fact that the parade route doesn't actually come within a mile of the street that bears King's name, holding the festivities downtown serves as a reminder that while Dr King was indisputably a black man, the values he preached were values for all of us, race and color nothwithstanding.

In the morning, before all the hoopla, there will be a silent march through northeast Oklahoma City to commemorate the marches led by Dr King in the Sixties. It will begin at the Ralph Ellison Library at 23rd and (yes!) MLK Avenue, and end at the Oklahoma Historical building at 22nd and Lincoln, where a bell will be rung to break the silence.

I've got to work — 42nd and Treadmill waits for no one — but at least one Oklahoma blogger will be in the parade: JMBranum of JMBZine will be marching with the local branch of the Green Party.

In 1999, the Cherokee Nation held a constitutional convention, the tribe's first since 1976. That was the easy part.

For the next three years, a translator worked to port the resulting document from English into the Cherokee language.

Now comes the task of getting the constitution approved by the President of the United States, or by the Bureau of Indian Affairs on his behalf, as required by the previous Cherokee constitution. The tribe has passed an amendment to delete the Federal vetting requirement, but the BIA is balking.

Eventually, I suspect, the BIA will come around. And one of the provisions of the constitution allows the Cherokee Nation to send a non-voting delegate to Congress, which should be interesting.

House Bill 1888, introduced into the Oklahoma legislature by Rep. John Trebilcock (R-Broken Arrow), would impose a two-year waiting period on outgoing lawmakers wishing to become Capitol lobbyists, and would forbid them to accept "anything of value" during those two years.

I doubt this will go anywhere, especially with a number of lawmakers facing term limits and having to get real jobs, but Trebilcock, a first-termer who previously taught high school history and government, points out: "A lot of [legislators] go to the Capitol wanting to change things and they think they have to play the game. Or they become cynical. Eventually they forget why they went there."

And the occasional reminder never hurts.

I'm pretty sure the Dwight David Eisenhower National Defense Interstate Highway System and Cobalt Testing Range, or whatever the hell it's officially called, was never intended for commuters; the very word "Interstate" would seem to make that clear. Still, if a road is there, you tend to use it, and I don't have any particular qualms about using it for the bulk of my newly-tripled commute.

On the other hand, I've got to wonder about that character in the purple Dodge with no license plate (he had a cardboard placard in the rear window indicating the number of the plate he presumably had lost) this morning. It was bad enough that he was in the right lane of the Northwest Distressway signaling left; eventually he figured out that he was wearing out his blinker and followed the lane up the approach to the Belle Isle Bridge and I-44, a ramp cutting the tightest possible curve to match the curvature of the bridge itself. Once in place on the freeway, he promptly exited at Western Avenue, having driven barely half a mile on I-44. Why did he bother? Admittedly, surface streets in this area border on the incomprehensible, but we're talking a few blocks at most. This can't be what General Eisenhower had in mind.

As counterpoint, the stereo burst into that fake bluegrass ditty about rotting roadkill — you know the one — and as the song began to fade, the scent of eau de polecat made its presence known.

C'mon, stink!

The parent company of Local Oklahoma Bank, a former S&L which ranks as the state's seventh-biggest bank, will be acquired by Texas-based International Bancshares Corp. for $385 million. This is IBC's first acquisition outside Texas; the bank, headquartered in Laredo, seeks to build a presence along the I-35 corridor. (Is Wichita next?)

The deal should close by summer; the signs will presumably be changed shortly thereafter.

Expansion Management magazine offers this none-too-startling prediction:

And what cities are those? The magazine's sixth annual list of the 50 hottest cities for corporate expansion or relocation, based on their survey of major site-evaluation consultants, has a distinctly Southern flavor to it: Atlanta is at the top, followed by Nashville and Jacksonville. And Oklahoma's two biggest cities are no slouches either; Oklahoma City took the #9 position, and Tulsa came in 15th.

A ranking, of course, is just a number, or is it? Magazine editor Bill King, quoted in The Oklahoman, explains where it fits into the scheme:

And Tulsa, in particular, would like to make a few more lists these days; it's nice to be highly regarded, but it's even nicer to have something to show for it.

Mike over at OkieDoke has the latest poll numbers for the Oklahoma primary (week after New Hampshire, in case you'd forgotten), and Wesley Clark, last seen a close second to Howard Dean, is now out in front of the pack with a nine-point lead over...John Edwards?

Meanwhile, the Dean Machine is sputtering in fourth place, barely above Joe Lieberman. (Dear Howard: The time to peak is on election day, not ten months before.) I simply can't bring myself to get on the Clark bandwagon — basically, he strikes me as Hillary Clinton with nicer legs — which means that with a week and a half to go, I am still officially Undecided.

I did notice today, though, an actual Kucinich sticker, the first I've seen hereabouts. Yard signs will probably not start to blossom until Wednesday, after the New Hampshire results are known.

The poll was taken by SurveyUSA on the 21st and 22nd. Quoted margin of error is 4.3 percent. (The complete poll results, linked above, require Adobe Reader.)

That would be State Senator Sam Helton, a Lawton Democrat, who has proposed a bill (Senate Bill 1130, for those keeping score) dubbed the "Dog and Cat Ownership Responsibility Act," which intends to make sure you have your pets neutered by charging you if you don't.

Under SB 1130, if you expect to own an intact male of either species aged six months or older — or an intact female four months or older — you must have a license from the State Department of Health, which will cost you $100 per animal, per annum. Should you be so unfortunate as to have an actual whelping on site, you'll need a Noncommercial Breeder's License at the same price, with a maximum of three critters. If you deliberately breed these animals, as a hobby or to earn your daily bread, the state will charge you $1000 a year.

I have no doubt that this sort of thing would cut down on the number of strays and such which wind up in animal shelters. On the other hand, so would drowning all puppies and kittens at birth, which no one is recommending. Yet.

The American Kennel Club, for its part, is having a cow.

For a state that will almost certainly cast its electoral votes for George W. Bush, Oklahoma is getting a pretty substantial amount of attention from the Democratic challengers.

Not that we care, particularly; these guys are not only from out of town, they're from off the wall. John Edwards claims a "great cultural connection" with the Sooner state, apparently because some of it is still rural. Wesley Clark, it appears, can quote Scripture. And Joe Lieberman implored us to pay no attention to those Iowa and New Hampshire things. Believe me, Joe, I tried my best.

(Via Wonkette)

This week's Oklahoma Gazette has brief writeups of the Democratic contenders in Tuesday's primary, and the last line of each is an official campaign phone number, which prompted a little bit of research from this desk, which in turn prompted a raised eyebrow or two, for the following reasons:

• Three of the candidates don't have local phone numbers, because, so far as I can determine from their official Web sites, they don't have campaign offices in this state. Sharpton and LaRouche I can understand — budgetary limitations and all — but John Kerry? And at least Al and Lyndon will pick up the tab if you call them on their toll-free lines; Kaptain Ketchup gives a number in D.C. that will probably cost you.

• Two of the candidates — Dean and Kucinich — have offices in the same building (NE 40th and Lincoln Blvd.) that houses the state Democratic Party. How did they wangle that deal?

• Clark and Lieberman have downtown offices in the general vicinity of Automobile Alley. I have no idea where Edwards' command post is, though I give him props for having what appears to be voice-over-IP phone service, thereby saving a few bucks if he needs to call, say, John Kerry's D.C. office.

A 17-year-old car thief was booked into the Hotel Whetsel this past week. Officials said it was the kid's 69th arrest.

There are those who complain that the state of Oklahoma executes juveniles; I'm starting to think we're not executing enough of them.

Wesley Clark's campaign expenses in Oklahoma have gone up by $450.

Leaving McAlester for Oklahoma City this weekend after a campaign appearance, Clark's three-car entourage was busted by state troopers for doing 88 mph in a 75-mph zone [scroll to bottom]. Clark staffer Reid Cherlin, driving the lead car, says he had the cruise control set on 83 mph, presumably in the belief that ten percent over will not get you a ticket.

Each of the offenses carries a $150 fine.

The Oklahoma primary is tomorrow, and it's time I checked to make sure everything is in order before I trot off to the polls:

• Register at new address: Check. Did this back in November, in fact.
  
• Find new polling place: Check. It's at the Presbyterian Church, a quarter-mile away, and no, I don't think this is an undue breach of separation of church and state.
  
• Select a candidate: Uh, I'll get back to you tomorrow.

There may be as many as half a million voters today in the Oklahoma Presidential primary, and the vast majority of them will likely be Democrats; there are just about as many Republicans as Democrats in this state, and there is, technically, a GOP race, but I doubt there will be an enormous amount of turnout, since President Bush is headed for a coronation at the party convention this summer. Still, I'd like to see some votes for Bill Wyatt, if only to get Bush's attention.

Me? Well, as a registered Democrat in a closed primary, I don't have the option of supporting Wyatt. On the other hand, the candidates on my ballot strike me as something less than inspired. And while the differences among their domestic policies are largely trivial — will we spend too much, or way too much, on health care? — exactly one candidate seems to grasp the notion that there are more immediate threats to the Republic than a percentage point or two of taxation, which is why when I'm through with my dental appointment today, I will grit my semi-sparkling teeth and pull the lever for Joe Lieberman. Yes, he spends money like a 21st-century Republican; yes, he's a common scold, occasionally rising to the level of uncommon scold. But in 2004, the desired characteristic, in true Firesign Theatre tradition, is Not Insane, and rather than opt for the bumbler, the banshee or the Botoxed, I'm going with Joe.

Such a Valentine's day deal: For fifty bucks, one of the half-dozen barbershop quartets of the OK Chorale will bang on the door of your Significant Other, present a card and a long-stemmed rose, and sing two songs.

That is, if said S.O. lives within about a 14-mile radius of downtown, which pretty much eliminates anyone I'd consider for this gift.

First post, 8 pm: The polls closed about an hour ago; John Edwards has a very slight lead over Wesley Clark, hovering around the 30-percent mark, with John Kerry back in the lower 20s.

KOMA is reporting that in Oklahoma County, Howard Dean managed a reasonable second and Joe Lieberman actually made double digits, but out in the rural areas it's almost all Edwards and Clark.

Turnout seems pretty good; I was the 346th voter in my new precinct, two hours before closing. (In a strange twist of fate, the person right in front of me was the previous owner of my house; she's definitely gotten prettier since she moved out of here, and obviously she hasn't moved very far if she's still in the precinct.)

Update, 8:30 pm: Bill Wyatt has gotten almost 7 percent of the GOP vote with half the precincts counted.

Update, 9:05 pm: KTOK is reporting that with 75 percent of the numbers in, Edwards and Clark are still in a dead heat at 30 percent; Kerry has risen to 26 percent; Lieberman will apparently beat Dean for fourth.

Update, 9:25 pm: With 1942 of 2237 precincts in, the Clark-Edwards difference is 0.02 percent (71 votes); Wyatt is up to 9 percent for the GOP.

Update, 9:40 pm: KOMA has called it for Clark.

Update, 9:45 pm: Clark has opened up a 700-vote lead; Wyatt is over 10 percent.

Update, 9:55 pm: Clark's lead has grown to over 1000, which should be enough to nail it down. Edwards is a very close second, Kerry not quite so close a third; Al Sharpton outpolled Dennis Kucinich to pick up sixth place.

Deaniacs were lined up in the median on the Northwest Distressway this afternoon; I hope none of them threw themselves into ongoing traffic.

The numbers will be posted by the State Election Board here; the results will not be certified as official until next Tuesday.

Sign seen in the window at Flip's Wine Bar & Trattoria:

A few people took this warning seriously: turnout was pretty decent, even on the GOP side where there was less of a race, and state party officials beamed, noting that the largely-bipartisan decision to move the primary to early February had paid off in vastly greater interest by both voters and candidates.

The AP's exit poll attempts to explain the motivations of state voters.

No doubt about it: this is going to be one heck of a ride between now and November.

Tuesday I plugged the OK Chorale's Singing Valentine offer.

It occurs to me that you might conceivably want to have female voices in four-part harmony, in which case be advised that the OKCity Chorus is offering a Singing Valentine package of their own.

"Entering Oklahoma — set your watch back 90 years."

Actually, despite the old joke, sometimes we manage to be contemporary. Our semi-electronic voting system is speedy, far more reliable than anything they've come up with in benighted states like Florida, and dirt-cheap to operate.

Sometimes we're even ahead of our time. Who else in 1937, eleven years before the birth of Al Gore, would have thought of taxing the Internet?

No, really. From the instructions from Form 511, the Oklahoma income-tax form, page 10:

Which, of course, includes all that stuff you ordered from nevermindwhereweare.com.

Conveniently, the use-tax rate is usually equal to the sales-tax rate: 4.5 percent state, plus county and city levies if any. (Here in the Big Town, it's a startling 8.375 percent.)

Businesses, who have had to keep books on this matter all along, have been paying this tax on a regular basis — last year, the tax brought in $92 million or so — but this is the first year that the Tax Commission has attempted to collect it from individuals through the income-tax return; they hope to increase the take fivefold.

And if you haven't saved all your receipts from online purchases ("if", he says), the state suggests an estimate of 0.056 percent of your adjusted gross income: if you made around $30,000 in 2003, your presumed use tax is $17. I don't expect anyone to go to jail over this, but a lot of people are going to be caught off guard.

A measure to ban soft drinks and sweets from grade-school vending machines failed to get past the Senate Education Committee; the final vote was an 8-8 tie, which doesn't necessarily mean the bill is dead, but it's certainly coughing up blood.

It wasn't quite a party-line vote, either. Six Democrats and two Republicans voted for the bill; six Republicans and two Democrats voted against it. Generally, the proponents agreed that too many kids eat too much junk; opponents argued that these matters should be settled at the local, rather than the state, level.

Tattoo parlors, for some inscrutable reason, remain illegal in this state.

JMBranum points out that the state's Green Party, in its official platform, has called for the lifting of the ban. Fine with me. This is the Greens' rationale:

Besides, having to drive to Gainesville burns up a whole lot of fossil fuel.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, apparently satisfied with having trashed the memory of Dr Robert Atkins, has gone back to its primary function: haranguing perfectly innocent towns into changing their names.

In years past, they've concentrated on New York towns: first Fishkill, then Hamburg. (How they managed to miss the Catskill Mountains is beyond me, especially since they went there to pester producers of foie gras.) Now they've turned their attention to Oklahoma, and the town of Slaughterville, south of Norman, which is of course named after grocer James Slaughter.

Other towns in Oklahoma which probably should fear for their identities:

Battiest: Insults persons with psychological disorders. (Actually, it's pronounced "bah-TEEST".)

Beaver: Offensive to women. (See Beaver College — oops, Arcadia University.)

Bowlegs: Mocks a physical disability bone condition.

Bushyhead: No comment.

Hooker: Likewise.

Kremlin: Obviously a leftover KGB plant.

Slapout: Promotes violence.

Warr Acres: Promotes lots of violence.

Yukon: Named after a sport-utility vehicle.

And God forbid anyone should spell Tulsa backwards.

(Muchas gracias: Cam Edwards.)

(Update, 18 February: Slaughterville says "Neigh"...er, "Nay".)

Last year, Rep. Leonard Sullivan was trying to drum up support for renaming the North Canadian River (so called because it lies north of the Canadian River) the Oklahoma River.

Sullivan's idea went nowhere, but it's resurfaced this year in a reduced form: Senate Bill 1259, now out of committee, would rename the segment of the river that runs through central Oklahoma City — seven miles from Meridian to Eastern — to, yes, the Oklahoma River.

I couldn't tell you if anyone from Canada came through here with the idea of naming two rivers after his homeland, but French explorers and traders were active here in the late 17th and early 18th century, ending presumably around 1762 when France signed the Louisiana territory (which included Oklahoma) over to Spain so they wouldn't have to give it up to the British. (Spain traded it back to France in 1800, just in time for France to sell it off to the nascent United States.)

Proponents of the change are always citing the tourist trade as justification. Personally, were I just visiting town, I'd be more curious about a river called "Canadian" way down here than I would a river called "Oklahoma," but maybe that's just me.

Lynn, we know, is fond of this state, its people, its flora and fauna, sometimes even its weather.

She draws the line, however, at the Legislature, and offers by way of illustration three particularly dumb laws.

No doubt she could come up with more without a whole lot of effort.

Terry Nichols, on trial for 161 cases of murder in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, apparently has floated the idea of pleading no contest to the charges in exchange for an agreement from the prosecution not to seek the death penalty.

Don't count on this motion going anywhere; I'm inclined to think that had Nichols, like co-conspirator Timothy McVeigh, been sentenced to the Super Shot for the Federal charges on which they were convicted, there wouldn't be any support for trying Nichols on state charges in the first place. And The Oklahoman pointed out last week in an editorial that Nichols could have copped a plea long ago, suggesting that it might have been more favorably considered before all the trial mechanisms were set into motion.

But that was then. Unless something wholly unexpected takes place in the next couple of weeks, the trial will begin as scheduled on the first of March.

(Update, 8:45 am: Cam Edwards isn't surprised that the prosecution isn't biting: "The whole reason Nichols is on trial is so we can kill him.")

Last week, PETA offered twenty grand worth of soy products or something to the folks in Slaughterville, Oklahoma, in the hopes of persuading the town to change its name to "Veggieville".

Bill Hightower, who raises Limousin cattle in Slaughterville, came up with a counteroffer:

I need hardly add that the town is retaining its name, and beef is still what's for dinner.

Rudolph Giuliani was in town yesterday to accept an honorary doctorate from the University of Oklahoma. "Yes, we should be afraid," he said. "No, it should not stop us."

A guy in the crowd was evidently not stopped. He stood up and yelled something about how the al-Qaeda network had had nothing to do with the World Trade Center bombings, and Giuliani knew it.

And who was responsible?

"Wal-Mart did it, and you know it," said the guy.

The fellow was eventually propelled from the premises, and Giuliani shrugged. "I am used to protesters."

Still: Wal-Mart? Somewhere in this state there must be a meth lab putting out defective product.

Forbes has issued its annual list of the World's Richest People. As usual, admission to this club requires a net worth of $1 billion US, and two Oklahomans made it to the list this year. Interestingly, both of them tend to be somewhat reclusive, and both of them tend to give it away nearly as fast as they earn it.

Number 159 ($3 billion) is George Kaiser, head of Tulsa-based Bank of Oklahoma and Kaiser-Francis Oil Company, and founder of many charities which at his insistence do not bear his name.

Number 514 ($1.1 billion) is David Green, head of Oklahoma City's Hobby Lobby and Mardel stores, who supports local antipoverty efforts and Christian missions overseas.

For the record, my own net worth doesn't extend to ten digits; it's more like four. I note, though, that (1) at least it's positive, something it hasn't been before, and (2) I owe George Kaiser a rather startling sum. (Bank of Oklahoma holds my mortgage.)

(Disclosure: When this was first posted, the "startling sum" was actually spelled out.)

Michael Bates calls Senate Bill 553, the bill to allow an expansion of gaming, "a typical Okie stitch-up," and explains:

Which is nothing unusual where the wind comes sweeping down the plains. What should have we done?

Governor Henry, who has pushed for this measure, points out that any revenues generated will be earmarked for education, except for $250,000 allocated to the treatment of gambling addiction. This is the sort of thing that almost guarantees support from the Ed Biz, which welcomes anything that brings in more money. Bates is not impressed:

They are indeed pushing it. According to the OEA's Legislative Update, one of the Association's goals is:

Read: "substantial new revenues for us."

I don't doubt for a moment that they could use the money, and it's conceivable that some of it could be used wisely, but something about all this rubs me the wrong way.

"President Bush," writes Brian Brus in the Oklahoma Gazette, "recently has had a hard time proving his whereabouts in 1972 to the satisfaction of political opponents. Even after the White House released military records from his service in the Texas Air National Guard, some still questioned whether he completed his military duty and unfavorably compared his wartime service to that of his likely Democratic presidential opponent, decorated combat veteran John Kerry."

What does it take to prove one's whereabouts? Brus hit up a number of public figures in Oklahoma and demanded, "Where were you in '72?"

Governor Henry wasn't in the military at all; in fact, reports press secretary Phil Bacharach, he was in the fourth grade at Sequoyah Elementary School in Shawnee, and he has the report cards to prove it.

Former governor George Nigh was in the Navy in the middle Forties, but where was he in 1972? "I was lieutenant governor of Oklahoma," he said. Asked if he could document this claim, Nigh asserted: "I'm sure there's some sort of travel voucher I turned in."

Should anyone ask, I was in the Army for most of 1972, and I still have copies of orders and payroll forms if anyone needs to verify this.

"If you build it, they will come." In Tulsa, says Bruce, they mostly build churches:

Sounds like an argument for letting the churches run the schools, doesn't it? (Well, maybe not.)

Yeah, but with few exceptions, they all celebrate the Lord's Day on Sunday. I doubt seriously that you can persuade any congregation to hold Sunday services on, say, Tuesday evening. (Wednesday evening, well, that's a whole different issue.)

He's not kidding. Between Youngs and Independence along NW 50th Street in OKC, a distance barely more than a mile, there are no fewer than five churches, including two from the same denomination. And 50th is a two-lane residential street through the eastern half of that area; imagine what some of the major arteries look like.

I have little doubt that the Almighty looks upon small, modest churches no less favorably than the ones that look like shopping malls; still, I can't bring myself to get worked up over people spending their own money to build fancy houses of worship — even if they do take the occasional parcel off the county tax rolls.

When Corporation Commissioner Bob Anthony announced that he would run for Don Nickles' Senate seat, the good ol' boys of the Grand Old Party shrugged: Anthony built his reputation by taking on, and usually vanquishing, men in suits, and, well, this is not how you rise to the top of the Republican totem pole in Oklahoma. Kirk Humphreys, the former Oklahoma City mayor who had been anointed by the party faithful, had little to worry about from Bob Anthony.

But now former Congressman Tom Coburn has thrown his hat into the ring, and suddenly it's a race. Fiscal conservatives like Coburn because he's incredibly tight with a tax dollar; social conservatives like Coburn because he pays them more than lip service. And I have to give Coburn credit for doing something relatively unprecedented in Oklahoma history: he vowed he would serve only three terms in the House, max, and after six years he duly returned to private life.

Mike at Okiedoke sums up the guy this way:

Now is the time for Kirk Humphreys to sweat.

Perhaps the indictment of WorldCom chairman Bernard Ebbers has made the company more amenable to other legal actions: Attorney General Drew Edmondson has announced that the state is negotiating with WorldCom to settle the state's lawsuit against the company.

According to Edmondson, the company has been cooperative, and the amount he expects to recover will be "more than the cost of litigation."

I hadn't had any particular urge to see Bertolucci's The Dreamers; the reviews had been mixed, and the subject matter — basically, the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly is superimposed upon 1968 Paris while Daniel Cohn-Bendit warms up in the wings — didn't seem especially appealing.

Then the Oklahoma Gazette decided to do their sporadic Dueling Reviewers thing, praise from Preston Jones and panning from Doug Bentin; each made his case well enough that I found myself thinking, "Maybe I ought to see this thing after all, just on general principles." Bad idea. Nowhere, in the twin articles, on other Gazette pages, or on their Web site, is there any indication of where the damned film might be playing.

The Oklahoman, which accepts no ads for films rated NC-17 — over the years, there have been times when I thought they would turn down ads for R-rated films if they didn't need the bucks — would of course be no help. Fox Searchlight, the film's distributor, has a blog, which pointed me to various search tools; eventually I discovered that The Dreamers is not playing here at all, and if I have any desire to see it in an actual moviehouse, I must drive to Tulsa, Kansas City or Dallas.

Which begs the question: Why did the Gazette devote a whole page to arguing the merits of a film that the vast majority of its readers will never get to see until the release of the inevitable DVD? To try to shame one of the theater chains into booking the film for a week? Fat chance.

(Update, 7 March, 6 pm: The Gazette responds.)

Friday, I wondered just what had gotten into the Oklahoma Gazette: they published not one but two reviews of Bertolucci's The Dreamers, a film which is not playing anywhere within a hundred miles.

Today, the Gazette's Preston Jones explains:

I can only conclude that AMC Quail Springs needed the extra space for 50 First Dates, which was shown eleven times today.

The Noble Theater, for you out-of-towners, is the 250-seat theater at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, in downtown's nascent Arts District. The Museum itself is actually an extensive redesign of the old 1600-seat Centre Theater, which opened in 1947 and shut down along with most of downtown circa 1980. The Noble's film program is extensive, and until the Harkins opens in Bricktown, presumably this summer, it's the only downtown venue for film. And happily for me, it's a shorter drive to downtown than it is to Quail freaking Springs.

The official sunrise this morning is 6:49 am, right in the middle of my morning commute, and since said commute is now largely in an easterly direction, I got to see more of it than eye doctors generally recommend.

The evergreens haven't changed in months, of course, but their bare-branched brethren appear by some trick of the light to have turned their limbs skyward, supplicants hoping that today they will be favored. Grey against pink, a few seconds later grey against orange, and then the background is awash in light and the colors dissolve into the brightest white there is and you must look away or never see anything ever again.

The speed with which this happens tends to inspire the right foot; rounding a curve, I took a peek at the instrument cluster, and discovered I was whipping along at 76 mph. This was not really too fast for conditions — traffic was light on this stretch — but not likely to warrant getting off with a warning should a patrolman take notice; the police tend to be unimpressed with stories about heading for the heart of the sunrise.

Similar scenes await me for much of the next month, after which time the government robs me of sixty minutes and my morning world is plunged into darkness once more.

Occasionally, someone — usually someone from Oklahoma — grumbles about the annual OU-Texas football clash in Dallas' Cotton Bowl, which is, after all, in Texas.

Well, it's not going anywhere, at least through 2008; Dallas Mayor Laura Miller announced today that the Cotton Bowl will be keeping OU-Texas for five more years under a new contract. The City of Dallas will pay each school $250,000 per year for expenses and waive the $94,000 stadium rental at Fair Park; in addition, four thousand new seats will be installed in the end zones.

I never did worry too much about this. I mean, Dallas is fairly close to the midpoint of a Norman-to-Austin drive, and where are you going to find truly neutral territory? It took years just to establish where the Texas-Oklahoma border actually is.

A nice tribute to the late Jenkin Lloyd Jones in Tulsa Today, brought to my attention by Okiedoke.

Says Mike:

Indeed it doesn't help, although there hasn't been actual competition in Oklahoma City since 1980, when The Oklahoma Journal folded; the Times had been absorbed by the Oklahoman decades before. The Tribune soldiered on until 1992, when the rival World, yoked to the Tribune in one of those pesky Joint Operating Agreements, saw an opportunity to dispose of its rival once and for all.

In the fall of 2002, I did a fairly readable Vent on JOAs in general and the Tribune under Jenk Jones in particular.

Kristin sees distinct advantages to Oklahoma guys, especially small-town Oklahoma guys:

Okay, allow a couple of points for tongue in cheek. But still:

We'll never run out of Sonics. And "good magazines" are in the eye of the beholder: most mainstream stuff is as near as Wally World, though you're going to have to hang closer to the big towns if you're jonesing for, say, Mother Jones.

On the other hand, conventional wisdom has it that people of this age (Kristin's an OU undergrad) want nothing so much as to get the hell out of Oklahoma altogether, so examples of young folks who actually like this place are always worth mentioning.

If in the ideal settlement both sides come away with something they wanted, the deal between MCI (previously WorldCom, and before that, um, MCI) and the State of Oklahoma must be pretty spiffy.

According to Attorney General Drew Edmondson, MCI will atone for the misdeeds of its previous management by boosting its employment in Tulsa from the current 1875 to approximately 3400. In addition, the company will assist the state in the prosecution of members of said management.

Tulsans may look askance at this deal — two years ago, WorldCom had a Tulsa payroll of 3000 before a series of layoffs — but, says Edmondson, it's the best deal that could be struck:

The 15 charges filed against the company by the state have been duly dismissed. MCI has ten years to bring its staffing up to the levels specified in the agreement; average pay for the additional positions is reported to be $35,000 a year.

(Update, 13 March, 5:30 pm: Mike Swickey [13 March, 3:08 pm] thinks this is a really bad idea.)

And no one is more adept at that clumsy maneuver than Rep. Bill Graves (R-Delerium), whose latest eruption came during a House session that was debating whether the state should establish a Latino Affairs Commission.

Said Graves, "We do have a lot of Mexicans and Hispanics that want to come here and live, and frankly, I think we're getting too many."

Ed Romo of the League of United Latin American Citizens was the first to weigh in with a complaint; he wants an apology from Graves. It's not likely he'll get it, though Graves has backpedaled slightly, claiming what he said, or at least what he meant, was that we had a surplus of illegal aliens.

I'm not exactly counting the days until Graves' departure — term limits will dispose of him shortly — but let it be known that when I went looking for a house, one of the geographical criteria I used was "Not in Bill Graves' district." I didn't say so, of course; I just set the boundaries accordingly.

So-called "scare quotes" are a useful rhetorical tool, put to use when you'd just as soon distance yourself from what's being said. Reuters, an international "news agency," has a reputation for such things.

Michael Bates suspects the Tulsa World was using this technique to discredit, ever so subtly, a City Council candidate they opposed editorially:

And why would this bit of trivia be an issue?

Especially since Mr Gomez' opponent was given no such "text decoration" in the World.

Oklahoma, like most states, does not provide statutory compensation for wrongful convictions. Rep. Opio Toure (D-Oklahoma City) has periodically introduced legislation to provide some sort of payment to those the state has unjustly imprisoned; the last time his bill made it through the Legislature, then-Governor Frank Keating vetoed it.

On the plus side, we haven't gotten to the point where we're charging them for room and board.

(Via Myria, who asks, "Under what logical and ethical standard can that be considered anything but outright evil?")

I've been resisting Fundrace's Neighbor Search; while I'm a big fan of full disclosure, I admit to being somewhat uneasy about a handy little tool that can reveal political contributions from around the world, across the nation, and up my street.

But what the hell. I fed my ZIP code to the form, and here's what we had, as of the end of last year:

For Democrats:
Wesley Clark - 3 contributors, total $3,175
Howard Dean - 9 contributors, total $4,693
John Edwards - 5 contributors, total $4,750
Dennis Kucinich - 1 contributor, total $1,000
Joe Lieberman - 4 contributors, total $2,250

For Republicans:
George W. Bush - 12 contributors, total $11,050

Nothing really surprising here: I expected that there would be close to an even split between the parties, with perhaps a slight edge to the Democrats, who after all had that many more candidates at the time. (Democrats received 59 percent of the dollars from this area.) Then again, my state senator and representative are both Republicans, though neither district line corresponds to the ZIP code boundaries.

No doubt it will be instructive to see the post-election numbers.

The issue of same-sex marriage, as simple as it may seem on the surface, gets more complicated the more you look at it.

A gay couple in Massachusetts adopted a child from Oklahoma, and the Oklahoma Department of Health was asked to issue a birth certificate for the child. Not sure of what to do, Health sent a query to the Attorney General's office.

Yesterday Attorney General Edmondson issued an opinion: while the state does not recognize unions of this sort and will not allow gay couples here to adopt, the state's adoption rules specify that the rules of other states will be recognized by Oklahoma courts, even if the adoptive parents are ineligible under Oklahoma law.

So Health duly issues the certificate, which in this state means that the original is sealed and a supplementary certificate showing the adoptive parents is produced, and everyone is happy — except for three legislators, who promised to spend Monday morning introducing measures to close what they view as a loophole.

There is, I suspect, no can big enough to hold all the worms released by the opening of the original can.

Ralph Nader brought his Presidential campaign to town today, speaking at Stage Center before an audience estimated at 150.

Getting on the Oklahoma ballot will be difficult for Nader: under state law, he will have to collect 37,027 signatures from registered voters to get his name listed among the candidates. "The two parties here," he said, "have been quite successful in mounting obstacles to competition from third party and independent candidates," and indeed Nader, then running as a Green, was unable to get on the ballot in 2000.

And the people who do get on the ballot here, said Nader, aren't exactly prizes either: our Congressional delegation comprises "the cruelest, most craven legislators in Washington — outside of Texas."

Hmmm. He may understand this place better than I thought.

The story so far:

• Massachusetts same-sex couple adopts child from Oklahoma, seeks state birth certificate.
  
  
• Department of Health asks Attorney General what the law specifies.
  
  
• AG responds that it's a legal adoption, even if the parents don't qualify under Oklahoma law; Health duly issues certificate.
  
  
• Republican lawmakers vow to do something about it.
  

The other shoe has dropped; Rep. Thad Balkman (R-Norman) has let it be known that the GOP is looking for a bill to which they can attach an amendment that would ban out-of-state adoptions of Oklahoma children by gay couples. Writing their own bill is evidently out of the question. (I suggest Senate Bill 1413, which to me looks like a back-door attempt to reinstate the state's sodomy laws by defining a new class of the "detestable and abominable crime against nature".)

The Department of Health reports that half a dozen children from Oklahoma have been adopted by gay couples outside the state.

Fundrace's Neigbor Search, discussed earlier here, has now been updated with contributions through 29 February. New figures for my ZIP code follow as appropriate:

For Democrats:
Wesley Clark - 6 contributors, total $3,850
Howard Dean - 13 contributors, total $5,483
John Edwards - 5 contributors, total $4,750
Dennis Kucinich - 3 contributors, total $1,225
Joe Lieberman - 5 contributors, total $2,350

For Republicans:
George W. Bush - 14 contributors, total $12,025

This is, as noted before, an area very much divided: Republicans were elected to the legislative positions, but some big-name Democrats, including a former governor and the current AG, live here.

To rather a large number of Americans, Oklahoma City is something of an enigma: it's one of the 30 largest cities in the country (29th, says the 2000 Census), but it simply doesn't register on the national radar unless there's something dreadfully terrible happening — say, a truck bomb at the Federal Building, or a tornado that measures nearly off the scale. To some extent, we tend not to notice our comparative invisibility; we've got work to do, dammit.

Mike Swickey (23 March) thinks it's time to take another look:

Emphasis in the original, and I don't think he's kidding; OCURA in those days was primarily concerned with removing old buildings, and not a whole lot of thought went into whether the replacements would be an improvement.

There are, they say, eight million stories in the Naked City. We're a bit more modest here, but I'm sure we've got tales to tell. And if anyone can find them, it's Mike Swickey.

Republicans in the Oklahoma House have moved to impeach Carroll Fisher, calling the controversial Insurance Commissioner "an embarrassment to the people of Oklahoma."

House Resolution 1040, by Fred Morgan (R-Oklahoma City) and John Trebilcock (R-Broken Arrow), calls for the Speaker to convene a committee to investigate Fisher's activities and decide whether impeachment and removal from office is warranted.

At the time the resolution was introduced, Fisher was turning over his financial records to a grand jury, which had charged him with embezzlement.

Fisher pointed out that at least one House Republican — Mike O'Neil, from Enid — was under a cloud after a sexual-battery charge was filed last month, and suggested that the resolution was partially motivated by a desire to take the heat off O'Neil.

Should the committee approve articles of impeachment, they would go to the full House for a vote; if a majority of the House agrees, the Senate would try the impeachment, with a two-thirds vote required to remove Fisher from office.

Today, former Senator Gene Stipe will appear before the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System with the hope of persuading the trustees thereof that they should not cut his pension from $7042 per month to $1572.

Stipe, who resigned from the Senate after pleading guilty to Federal charges connected to the dubious Congressional campaign of Walt Roberts in 1998, was informed by OPERS that due to his criminal record, he would be required to forfeit much of the retirement pay he accumulated over 53 years of service.

Votes by the OPERS board are not generally made public, but I'd love to see what embattled Insurance Commissioner Carroll Fisher, a member of the board who is having problems of his own, has to say on the subject.

After a series of legal challenges to the law, Attorney General Drew Edmondson asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court to rule on the Constitutionality of the state's 2002 ban on cockfighting, and today the Court upheld that ban by a 7-0 vote. (Two Justices abstained.)

Senator Frank Shurden (D-Henryetta) will continue his fight to get the penalties reduced; he says that this is another attack on American traditions, and "next it will be hunting, fishing and rodeos."

Not so loud, Frank. PETA has ears.

Someone passed to me what is represented as "internal polling from CHS (Cole Hardgrave [sic] Snodgrass)" regarding the Republican candidates for the Senate seat currently held by the retiring Don Nickles. CHS is a real firm, once headed by Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK 4) — the other partners are Sharon Hargrave Caldwell and Deby Snodgrass — and while I can't think of any reason why anyone from CHS would leak things to me, I'm reprinting it here just to see what happens.

 40% - Tom Coburn
 25% - Kirk Humphreys
  9% - Bob Anthony
  2% - Linda Murphy

CHS is working on the Humphreys campaign, so they can't be particularly happy about these numbers.

(Linda Murphy, in case you've forgotten, was appointed Secretary of Education in the Keating administration — Democrats in the legislature refused to confirm her appointment — after having run unsuccessfully against Sandy Garrett for State Superintendent.)

Of course, not being a Republican, I can't vote in their primary. I will hazard the following speculations:

(1) I thought Kirk Humphreys was going to shrug off this Bass Pro thing — as Mayor of Oklahoma City, he pushed hard for the $18 million city subsidy to the chain to park a store in Bricktown — until Bass Pro let it be known that they were building a larger store in Broken Arrow, for which they got no subsidy whatsoever.

(2) Bob Anthony, the maverick of the Corporation Commission, may be too much of an iconoclast for Oklahoma Republicans.

(3) The same might be said of Tom Coburn, who has a tendency to resist suggestions that he "go along to get along."

The primary will be held 27 July; a lot can happen between now and then, and this being Oklahoma, something almost certainly will.

In 1966, H. Richard Lawson graduated from tiny Oklahoma Christian College with a computer-science degree, going on to Purdue for postgraduate work. Lawson Software set up shop in Minnesota in 1975 in the arcane field of enterprise software, and today has grown to 1700 employees worldwide.

And now Lawson and his wife Pat (OC '67) have bestowed upon a much-grown Oklahoma Christian University a gift of 4 million shares of Lawson common stock, presently worth over $30 million, one of the largest gifts in the school's history. OC won't be going on a buying spree, though; most of the money will be allocated to the school's permanent endowment.

The OkiePundit has identified code words used by Oklahoma politicians of a certain stripe:

Well, shooting stuff is actually a pretty good use for those "lethal weapons," but the Sunday-school teachers I've met — admittedly a small sample — didn't strike me as particularly interested in marginalizing people. Maybe it's different in Senate District 18, a narrow vee in the spirit of Elbridge Gerry which extends from east Tulsa to a corner of Grand Lake, where the Pundit doesn't actually dwell but did find these terms in a mailing.

Lynn S. heard the big BOOM, and — well, let her tell you:

Might have been. Meth labs are second only to wind in terms of sheer ubiquity in these parts; a couple weeks ago they found one operating out of a hotel room on Route 66, about three-quarters of a mile from me. Nothing was blown up, but the mere presence of the damned thing was disconcerting. For all I know, there may be another one by now.

The state thinks they can curb the industry — and let's face it, by now it's big enough to be considered an industry — by restricting sales of products containing pseudoephedrine, a common base ingredient in meth. Wishful thinking, say I.

Occasionally I complain about clowns to the left of me. Lynn would like you to know about jokers to the right:

There was a flap some years back about a Tulsa Union student alleged to be a witch; for the life of me I can't understand why she didn't turn the lot of them into newts.

Lynn continues:

I remember attending a science-fiction con in Tulsa at a hotel opposite ORU, complete with Society of Creative Anachronism displays on the lawn; passersby, observing the jousting, alternated between appalled and actually frightened. "You'd think," I said, gesturing towards Oral's Prayer Tower, "they'd appreciate the medieval around here."

In Oklahoma City, where I now live, our moonbats work on policy, not on philosophy: the poster child is probably Rep. Bill Graves. Proximity to Graves is probably harmful to one's higher brain functions; fortunately, I don't live in his district, and he'll be term-limited into oblivion soon enough.

Oklahoma's primary elections are closed: Democrats vote only for Democrats, Republicans for Republicans. The Oklahoma Libertarian Party, whose membership may be described as "not large," proposed opening their 2000 primary to members of the major parties. The Election Board balked, noting that state law permits them to admit registered Independents, but not members of other recognized parties.

Eventually the Libertarians sued the Election Board; US District Judge Stephen Friot ruled against the party, saying that the law was intended to insure "that the results of a primary election... accurately reflect the voting of the party members." An appeal was filed, and yesterday the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Friot's decision in a 3-0 vote.

Nothing in this ruling mandates that the two major parties have to allow crossover voting, but it's a first step towards opening up the primaries, which I think will prove beneficial to third parties in years to come, especially with the general level of dissatisfaction with the Big Boys.

The US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — and who knew we had one of those? — reports that one in every ten Oklahomans suffers from some form of mental illness.

Sometimes I think the other nine enjoy it.

An examiner for the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System has informed former senator Gene Stipe that the forfeiture of 78 percent of his legislative pension is justified by Stipe's guilty pleas in federal court, which constitute a violation of his oath of office.

The examiner's findings will be passed to the OPERS board for a final ruling.

For the first time in years, the entire state of Oklahoma meets the Environmental Protection Agency's 8-hour ground-level ozone standards.

In recent years, parts of the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metropolitan areas have been on the EPA's nonattainment list, although it wasn't because of increased ozone, but because of tighter standards, proposed in 1997 and adopted in 2001 after court challenges.

People who don't suffer from respiratory ailments will likely notice no significant difference, except for the absence of ozone alerts in the media.

Which they didn't, but what the heck.

The Triple-A Oklahoma RedHawks dropped their home opener at the Brick in front of about 11,500 fans. Omaha's Royals won 8-3, and the fireworks display promised for the evening was cancelled due to higher-than-usual winds.

Now 6-3, the 'Hawks remain on top of the Pacific Coast League East division, though they can't expect to stay there if they strand ten runners every night.

The prosecution in the trial of Terry Nichols has asserted that alleged Secret Service video of the explosion in the Murrah bombing does not actually exist.

Jon Hersley, then the FBI case agent for the bombing probe, testified "There is no such tape.... We would have followed that tremendously if that existed."

Nichols' defense claimed that the government withheld this video from co-conspirator Timothy McVeigh's defense, and had moved for a dismissal.

(Update, 2:30 pm: McGehee has an AP story that describes the tape.)

If you're stymied by NewsOK's registration, use this:
user: cgh at windowphobe.com (substitute the appropriate character)
pw: carlotta

If the Oklahoma House has its way, some sex offenders would be subjected to castration. The House's amendment to Senate Bill 1413 specifies that the procedure will be used only after conviction of first- or second-degree rape or forcible sodomy, and then only if there are two prior convictions and supporting DNA evidence — unless the perp requests it, perhaps as part of a plea bargain.

A similar measure got through the Legislature in 2002, but was vetoed by Frank Keating, then governor, who called it "reckless." Brad Henry, who succeeded Keating, has so far given no indication of how he will respond.

The amended bill also contains a strange provision from Rep. Thad Balkman (R-Norman) which would bar the viewing of sexually-explicit images in a moving vehicle. (Who knew this was a problem?)

The Senate will get one more shot at the bill before it goes to Governor Henry.

(Update: Originally, I had written this with reference to chemical castration; in fact, this measure calls for actual snippage. Thanks to Myria.)

First day of the Festival of the Arts, and that shiny white stuff accumulating on the ground isn't snow; you can name any sports ball, baseball or smaller, and we've had hail that size in the last quarter-hour. Normally I'd be home by now, but I'm not even going to challenge the roads under these conditions.

(Dave: Eat your heart out.)

(Update, 5:45 pm: Back at home. No damage.)

The Oklahoma Senate last week attached an amendment to House Bill 2259, a rewriting of the state's forcible-sodomy laws, which calls for a referendum on gay marriage. Today the House passed the bill.

The amendment, by Senator James Williamson (R-Tulsa), proposes that voters approve a change to the state Constitution that defines marriage in terms of one man and one woman, that declines to recognize marriages from other states that do not meet this definition, and that classifies the issuance of a marriage license to anyone else as a misdemeanor.

Expect a lawsuit to try to keep the question off the ballot.

On the per capita income scale, Oklahoma generally ranks fairly low — in 2002, we placed forty-third among the states, same as in 1998. Some of this is offset by housing costs, which are actually bearable in these parts, but by no means are we rolling in it.

The Ackerman McQueen ad agency took out a full-page ad in tomorrow's Oklahoman to recommend a solution. And they're not the first to suggest that we seem to come up with around 1200 bushels for every thousand points of light, either:

No doubt we're doing some serious rebuilding. And how hard is it to be less annoying than (some) Texans?

But, says the agency, we have to start relying on our own resources, rather than looking elsewhere:

Dr Richard Florida, guru of the Creative Class movement, was here this spring, and if I'm reading him properly, we can't really buy ourselves a Creative Class: we have to attract one, and that requires not only sprucing up the locations but the local attitudes as well. This doesn't mean we have to do a political 180, necessarily, but it does mean we have to come to grips with diversity in its truest sense: not something imposed from on high, but something that grows from the ground up.

Still, we can't, indeed we shouldn't, try to be the next Austin; we don't have to adopt a manifesto that proclaims to the world how open and free and cool we are. For all of Dr Florida's vaunted research, his favored cities aren't exactly setting economic records. I suspect no city in America has a higher percentage of people who see themselves as creative than does San Francisco, but there isn't anything in the way Baghdad-by-the-Bay is run that I'd want to see replicated in Oklahoma City.

Mostly, we're doing the right things. We spent a whole lot of money on downtown, but it brought in much more from the private sector. Tulsa is getting ready to try a similar formula. As we get used to small tastes of success, the bigger ones won't seem so far away. As Ackerman McQueen says:

We'll probably never be as wealthy as, say, Connecticut, the next state up on the population list. On the other hand, we'll probably never have Connecticut levels of taxation, either.

Matt Deatherage acknowledges the permanent appointment of Rich Fields to the announcer position on The Price Is Right, and quotes this bit from Fields' CV:

Weather, of course, is trivial in southern California, where it never rains — L.A. Story's weatherman Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin) actually prerecorded his forecasts for weeks at a time — but peppy TV-personality types won't last six minutes doing the weather in Oklahoma. Says Deatherage:

On the other hand, God forbid Gary England should try to crack a joke.

The first Saturday of May in El Reno marks the return of the World's Largest Onion-Fried Burger.

For a century or so, there's always been someone in El Reno vending sandwiches of this sort, and for the last fifteen years, the city has been capitalizing on this small-scale fame by putting together each year an onion burger to end all onion burgers. The Burgerzilla is about 8½ feet in diameter and, including buns and (of course) onions, weighs around 750 lb; mere Quarter-Pounders don't stand a chance.

Lots of events accompany the unveiling (and consumption) of the Big Burger, and if the weather is even slightly cooperative, about 25,000 folks will get a piece of the, um, action.

(Update, 1 May, 4:30 pm: This is one of those days they call "breezy," which means that the wind will blow your car door shut about half a second before you've actually cleared the sill, but there was a smidgen of sunshine, and it was possible to get a whiff of the whopper Monster Burger from blocks away. Johnnie's, the downtown eatery and keeper of the flame, as it were, cleared its parking lot and set up tables and chairs; I didn't look for out-of-state plates, but I figure that any day this town swells to twice its normal size, however briefly, counts as a success for the Travel and Tourism folks.)

Matt Deatherage has been following the strange tale of Brian Robertson, a high-school student from Moore who happened upon a text file containing what purported to be evacuation orders in the event of some unspecified disaster. Robertson read the file, found inspiration therein, and wrote a short story about an armed assault on his school.

In a normal environment, it would have ended there. But we live in the Age of Zero Tolerance, so when the school administration found the story, they called the cops, and Robertson was charged with a felony: under a 2001 let's-make-sure-we-don't-have-another-Columbine bill, it was illegal to "plan, attempt, conspire, or endeavor to perform an act of violence," and Robertson's story, viewed through the eyes of Zero Tolerance, looked like a plan. The charges looked even sillier once the case came before a judge, and were duly dropped, but inasmuch as it took over a year to bring the case to trial, Oklahoma law forbids expunging Robertson's record.

Until now. The Legislature has passed a measure which redefines the law to require malicious intent and provides the authority to clear the records of those charged under the previous version.

Notes Deatherage:

Which is, of course, as it should be.

It was never any secret that Terry Nichols' defense, which is scheduled to present its case starting today, would attempt to show that there were other conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and they got their first courtroom victory very quickly: the presiding judge has ruled that fingerprints found in Timothy McVeigh's car and in his hotel room can be examined. The defense contends that the prints were left by members of a group of white separatists, and that they had a substantial role in planning the bombing.

There was no reported response from John Doe No. 2.

Governor Henry signed Senate Joint Resolution 54 today, which calls for the Department of Commerce to work together with Murray State College in Tishomingo — which, coincidentally, offers an Associates degree with gunsmithing specialization — to come up with incentives to attract manufacturers of firearms to the Sooner State.

Senator Jay Paul Gumm (D-Durant) explains the rationale:

The OkiePundit is not particularly impressed:

And Commerce, with its "meager resources," is somehow going to be able to land a semiconductor foundry or a defense plant? (Admittedly, gay marriage gets a lot of press around here, but it's utterly irrelevant to this discussion except to the extent that a cheap shot was needed.)

I doubt much of anything will happen with SJR 54, but I plan to be amused if some gun maker does announce plans to open a facility here and the Usual Suspects chime in with "Well, we need jobs, but not these jobs."

Three Republicans in the Oklahoma Senate have put together a counterproposal to Governor Henry's tobacco-tax plan.

The two measures, despite a 44-cent-per-pack difference, are much alike. Henry's package calls for increasing the current 23-cent tax to 78 cents, and using much of the difference to finance health-care initiatives. In addition, the Governor wants to toss out the state's capital-gains tax and eliminate the trigger mechanism that raises the top income-tax rate when revenues fall short.

The GOP pushes the tax all the way to $1.22, supports the health-care measures, and will phase in a reduction of the top income-tax rate.

I'm a nonsmoker the easy way, so the bill which passes — probably a compromise package at the $1 level — will put a few coins in my pocket, since the top income-tax bracket is set so low that even I pay it. But I'm still disturbed by the manifest belief of politicians on both sides that it's okay to stick it to smokers. (Can you say "oppressed minority"? Sure. I knew you could.) And what kind of world is this where Republicans push for a tax increase — and a bigger tax increase than the Democrats seek, yet? The Legislature is evidently smoking something that the state doesn't tax.

Three teenaged boys at the Tecumseh Detention Center last year received breast-reduction surgery at a cost of approximately $14,000. The state Health Care Authority refused to pay for the operations, deeming them not medically necessary, and duly advised the Office of Juvenile System Oversight, which shuffled some personnel in response.

It occurs to me that if these lads were unhappy with their boobage at 15, they're going to be utterly despondent at 50.

Traditional and Biblical names seem to be the norm these days in Oklahoma; four hundred boys born last year were named Jacob, with Ethan, Michael, Joshua and Caleb rounding out the Top Five.

Meanwhile, 388 girls were named Emily; Madison (can we blame this on Daryl Hannah?) was second, followed by Emma, Hannah and Abigail.

Considering this is the state that produced builder Never Fail, cardiologist Safety First, MD, and one-time Attorney General Larry Derryberry, I'm surprised at the conventional sounds that some of these names seem to make.

Then again, my daughter, born here in the Okay City, came this close to being named Penelope Layne. I'm sure she's grateful for the change of heart.

When Bass Pro Shops announced they were locating a store in Broken Arrow, a southeast Tulsa suburb, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth down here at the other end of the Turner, inasmuch as Oklahoma City put up $18 million or so to land a Bass Pro location for the east end of Bricktown and apparently the company didn't ask anything from Broken Arrow.

Or did they? Michael Bates has connected the dots and found what looks like a very suspicious trail: Tulsa may have helped Broken Arrow snag the Bass Pro store in exchange for BA support of the Vision 2025 package. Inasmuch as BA, like most Tulsa suburbs, stands to pay more in taxes than it stands to gain in actual V2025 projects, there'd be no real reason for BA to support the package — unless there was a little something to sweeten the deal.

That sound you hear is Kirk Humphreys breathing a sigh of relief.

(Note: This is, or at least comes across as, an attempt to talk out of both sides of my mouth. Really.)

Bruce reports that the vast majority of respondents to a poll conducted by a Tulsa TV station would not be willing to increase their taxes to support the Tulsa Mayfest. What does it mean?

But that's only half the story he has to tell:

True enough. Getting a few bucks from the government might be nice, but there are always strings attached, and they may not be strings you like. Better to keep one's distance. Besides, most of these operations have learned how to turn a buck on their own. At the Festival of the Arts in Oklahoma City, the Arts Council gets a piece of anything sold on the premises; what's more, they solicit donations directly. I'm sure my one afternoon at the Festival, during which I spent $150 or so, generated a fair chunk of change for the Arts Council, likely far more than they'd get from me were I taxed to pay for it.

This is not to say that government has no role whatever in creating or maintaining "livability" — certainly the city of Oklahoma City didn't shy away from ponying up some funding to restore the Skirvin Hotel — but the city expects to turn a profit on this deal, and any dollars they make from the Skirvin are dollars they don't have to siphon from me. And while the Skirvin deal presents philosophical problems — I expect to hear from the Oklahoma Libertarian Party presently about how awful it is — I still think it will work.

The jury took about five hours to convict Terry Nichols on all 161 state counts of first-degree murder today, plus a charge of arson.

Around the first of July, the penalty phase should be completed; Nichols will draw either life in prison (which duplicates the federal sentence he's already serving) or execution by lethal injection. The testimony, already gruesome, will likely become more so as the jury weighs the options.

I can't swear to what it was like all day, but a spot-check of three burial parks suggested that a lot of people took time out today to pay tribute to those who served.

And while I didn't gather any statistics last year, it seems to me that there were a few more flags flying around town this year. (I have decided that mere window placards are inadequate to the task, and will acquire a new flag for next time around.)

Okay, maybe not that much. But Oklahoma is riven with fault lines, and they vibrate fairly frequently; yesterday, an hour and a half before sunset, a 3.0 temblor (temblette?) rumbled its way through Ardmore.

The most earth-shattering quake ever recorded in Oklahoma struck El Reno in 1952.

About one-quarter of the Oklahoma House will have to be replaced this year because of term limits, including Robert Worthen, who has represented District 87, where I live these days.

During the three-day filing period this week, no fewer than seven people filed to run for District 87; only District 19, in the northeast part of the state, drew more.

One of the four Republicans vying for the seat is Young Republicans official Trebor Worthen, who is Robert Worthen's son, and whose first name is "Robert" spelled backwards. Another is Tina Majors, who ran second in the GOP primary in 2002 for Senate District 40. Then there's Reece Kepler, who scores for Best Domain Name: RememberReece.com. I know nothing at all about Karen Khoury.

On the Democratic side, there's David B. Hooten, who may or may not be this David B. Hooten; Steve Harry, who won the Senate District 40 primary in 2002, losing to Cliff Branan in the election; and John Morgan, who owns a small business and who lives around the corner from me.

There's no Senate race here — Cliff Branan's term runs through 2006 — so I get to fixate on a House race this time. The primary will be 27 July (right after World Tour '04), with runoffs if needed on 24 August. So far, the only candidate I've met is John Morgan, who, as noted, lives around the corner from me.

Two classic films will be screened during this year's deadCenter Film Festival: Sir Carol Reed's The Third Man and Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum. But Festival buzz is all about the one premiere on the schedule: Banned in Oklahoma, a documentary by Gary D. Rhodes about what happened when some censorious doofus got it into his head that The Tin Drum was obscene and managed to stir up a thoroughly embarrassing cause célèbre that gave Oklahoma City a cultural black eye and a bill for half a million dollars in legal judgments for following the lead of said doofus.

An abridged version of Rhodes' documentary can be had in the Criterion Collection DVD edition of The Tin Drum, but this is the first appearance anywhere of the full 54-minute film.

It's not too common to close a road because of heat, but a stretch of Interstate 40 in Canadian County, near the Kilpatrick Turnpike, was shut down yesterday afternoon because of heat-induced pavement migration.

In other words, holes. Big ones.

I spotted the makings of something similar this morning on I-44: it was as though the concrete had pulled back from the expansion joint, leaving a substantial gap. This stretch of road being fairly bumpy at its best, not everyone is likely to notice, at least at first, though the wankers who fit their workaday sedans with twenty-inch wheels and 35-series tires are in for an increase in their daily ration of jaw-rattling jolts.

(Update, 8:20 pm: There's apparently another one, this time on Lincoln Blvd. near 36th Street. Since my Wednesday route home goes right through this intersection, I think it's time for Plan B.)

If ever I had any doubts that politicians pay attention to the Net, even down here at the D-list blog level, those doubts have been erased.

Last Friday I posted a list of candidates for House District 87, in which I live. Three Democrats and four Republicans are seeking to replace Robert Worthen, the GOP incumbent who is being term-limited out of a job. And of those seven, at least three have already taken note of that list; there are comments from them or their campaign staffs posted to it. I expect a couple of the others will follow shortly.

Ah, Google. How much you've changed this world of ours.

Bruce's most recent intro paragraph contains the following valuable information:

I don't think even Fargo is that somnolent.

Given the possibilities, though, perhaps he should follow this with a disclaimer: Don't try this at home.

(And I don't have a whole lot of jewelry, now that I think about it.)

South Carolina is lifting its ban on tattoo shops, which leaves one state where the practice remains illegal.

And why is that? Mike snickers:

But of course. And let's face it, we're never going to run out of either dermatologists or Southern Baptists — not that there's a whole lot of either in Iran, which ranks as just about the only other place on earth that bans tattooing.

(Disclosure: I have no such decorations. I believe I am the only family member who lacks them, in fact. I attribute this less to aesthetic concerns than to a general dislike for needles.)

Donald Thompson has served as a district judge in Sapulpa, Oklahoma for two decades, and apparently mandatory minimums didn't do a thing for him: Attorney General Drew Edmondson has filed an official complaint against Judge Thompson, charging him with, um, banging his gavel, so to speak.

Apparently he sacked his court reporter, the usual audience for his display, after she cooperated with an investigation into his behind-the-bench activities.

The complaint can be viewed in full here.

(Courtesy of Guy S. at Snugg Harbor, who noted: "In handing out a stiff sentence.....he hands out a stiff sentence!")

When last we heard from Jeffrey Schimandle, he was losing his license to practice medicine in Oklahoma. A decent interval having elapsed, Dr Schimandle applied to the Oklahoma State Board of Medical Licensure and Supervision for reinstatement, and was turned down; Elizabeth Scott, assistant Attorney General, representing the Board, says that Schimandle has "thumbed his nose at the state of Oklahoma."

Schimandle vows to appeal to the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, I noticed this quote by psychologist Ray Hand, who testified in Schimandle's behalf at the hearing:

If I remember correctly — I went to a lot of shrinks in the 80s — Dr Hand once asserted that I was a bright guy with a lot of potential, and well, we all know how that worked out.

Oklahoma's political history is replete with "colorful" characters, where "colorful" is, often as not, a euphemism for "raving loony." One of the legends is perennial candidate Virginia Blue Jeans Jenner — that's exactly the way her name appears on the Democratic primary ballot for House District 12 — who has never actually been elected to anything, but last time out did manage to pull a third of the votes in the 2002 Democratic primary for Labor Commissioner, losing to Lloyd Fields, who in turn lost to Republican Brenda Reneau Wynn in the general election. Michael Bates has an ad run by Jenner in her 1988 race for mayor of Tulsa, in which she quips:

And this morning, Emperor Misha I finds a letter from Jenner in The Dallas Morning News:

Misha's response — well, you'll have to read it for yourself.

(Incidentally, my dental hygienist is a hottie, and has no political ambitions. I think.)

Oklahoma legislators are limited to twelve years in office. Not all of them are enthusiastic about the limitation, either.

Senator Jim Maddox (D-Lawton), who was holding that office in 1992 when term limits began, would complete twelve years under the provisions of the law in 2004. Maddox, who was reelected in 2002 (half the Senate is chosen in "off-year" elections), argued that the voters intended to send him back to the Capitol for four years and that he should be allowed to complete those four years.

The state Supreme Court has now decided otherwise; Maddox is gone after 2004, and a special election will be held to fill the District 32 seat for the following two years.

I knew something was dreadfully wrong at NewsOK.com when I called up the site map and none of the links worked.

And where the hell is Hibbard?

The Midwest Prisoner is not overly fond of the townspeople around him:

I'd like to hear Bruce's take on this before I go any further.

Michael Bates has been all over the story that World Publishing Company, owner of the Tulsa World, plans to tear down the Skelly Building and the nearby Froug's Department Store building. The Skelly will become a parking lot for the World; Froug's will be replaced by a heating/cooling tower.

Says the World, this represents their commitment to downtown. Bates is not persuaded:

Here in Oklahoma City, The Oklahoman did exactly that when they ran out of room at Fourth and Broadway; that 1909 building is in use today, and OPUBCO donated the property just to its east to the Downtown YMCA, whose previous facilities had been destroyed in the 1995 bombing.

Let us not accuse OPUBCO of excessive altruism: they have their fingers in many pies, downtown and otherwise, and their legendary distrust for the public sector has seldom restrained them from tapping the taxpayers when the situation permitted. Did the Gaylords believe that what's good for OPUBCO is good for Oklahoma? Surely. And occasionally they turned out to be right.

What Tulsa doesn't need is to repeat the mistakes made in Oklahoma City during the "urban renewal" days, when the answer to every question was "bulldozer." We learned — the hard way, to be sure, but we learned. An example:

Situation: Not enough parking spaces in the Bricktown entertainment district.

Oldthink solution: Remove a vacant building or two, add parking lots.

Actual solution: Merchants lacking their own parking lots cut a deal with Metro Transit to run a free shuttle bus from an existing parking lot on the edge of Bricktown to their front doors during peak hours (4:30 pm to 2:30 am Thursday through Saturday plus special events).

There's nothing happening at this end of the Turner that can't be duplicated at the other. Let's hope Tulsa — and the Tulsa World — can learn from our experience.

If you were expecting any such in the race for Don Nickles' Senate seat, you might want to think again.

Both Brad Carson and Tom Coburn have represented the Second District in the house. Carson's first volley questioned Coburn's concern for his constituents:

(Source here.)

Tom Coburn has argued that Brad Carson is a lot farther to the left than his campaign material claims, and Coburn's Web site has now put up a chart with the title Who Really Represents Our Oklahoma Values?

This is going to get nasty, I have a feeling.

Well, maybe next year.

The Oklahoma City Lightning ran into some serious Detroit Demolition in last night's NWFA title game; the maidens from the Motor City put the hurt on the stormin' Sooners, 52-0. The Demolition have now won 31 in a row; I'm wondering if maybe they could actually handle one of the scuzzier NFL teams.

The city of Kingfisher, thirty miles from northwest Oklahoma City, has been in a financial bind; its accumulated deficit had grown to nearly $1 million, a lot of debt for a city of four thousand people. "We would have found ourselves bankrupt in 18 months," says City Manager Doug Enevoldsen.

They're not out of the woods yet, but fiscal year 2004 ended with a surplus of $193,000 following Enevoldsen's austerity program.

Perhaps ironically, Enevoldsen himself owes his position to budget cuts: he was let go from the Department of Tourism last year as part of the state's austerity program.

I mention this because, well, I have this weird idea that governmental units should not spend more than they can reasonably expect to receive.

Terry Nichols drew 161 consecutive life terms without parole today for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The sentence was issued by US District Judge Steven Taylor after the jury failed to agree on a sentence. In addition to the life terms for the murder charges, Nichols received shorter terms on arson and conspiracy charges, was fined $30,000, and was ordered to pay $5 million in restitution and legal fees, plus $161,000 toward the victims'-compensation fund.

Once the proceedings in Oklahoma are wrapped up, Nichols will return to federal custody in Colorado, where he is already serving eight life terms.

Well, it's not, actually, but were I attending one of the local schools, I'd probably be saying something like that towards the middle of the day. In an effort to get everyone off the premises by Memorial Day, school districts had been starting classes as early as the second week of August.

Then in 2002, Tulsa Public Schools, the state's largest district, moved their start date to early September; they've since realized some $380,000 in savings simply from not having the air conditioning cranked up to August levels for two weeks.

Oklahoma City Public Schools followed suit last year, saving about $125,000, and will start classes this year on the 30th of August. (Suburban districts are on their own schedules; Norman starts on the 25th, Putnam City the 26th, Edmond the 23rd.)

Three schools in the Oklahoma City district are on a year-round schedule: Horace Mann, Sequoyah, and Westwood. They started classes 22 July; after each of the first three nine-week sessions, there's a three-week break, and after the fourth, a seven-week summer break. How this affects utility costs, I don't know; the district says the reduced downtime in the summer has brought about some academic improvement.

Judge Donald Thompson, last seen exercising the wrong judicial prerogative in his Sapulpa courtroom, will retire at the end of this month rather than face ouster charges.

Thompson's attorney had this to say:

The allegations, filed by Attorney General Drew Edmondson this summer, included a variety of acts The Oklahoman describes as "genital-related."

Thompson's trial, scheduled for 13 September, will presumably be called off.

Governor Brad Henry, stumping for a state lottery at the Oklahoma Municipal League, gave out with this howler:

I'm not philosophically opposed to a tax on stupidity, but it's a safe bet, so to speak, this is going to inflame the Thou Shalt Not Gamble crowd huddled around the slots at the Lucky Star.

State Question 711 [link requires Adobe Reader], scheduled for the November ballot, would define marriage to be between one man and one woman, would prohibit the granting of the benefits of marriage to persons who are not married, and would forbid the state to recognize any nonconforming marriages from other states.

The ACLU has announced that it will challenge the measure with the intention of keeping it off the ballot entirely. I'd already decided to vote against 711, on the basis that it effectively prohibits any form of civil union or domestic partnership; however, I'm not keen on keeping it away from the electorate, just on general principle.

"All professions," said George Bernard Shaw, "are conspiracies against the laity." Kim Powers and Dennis Bridges would probably agree at this point.

Powers and Bridges, operators of Memorial Concepts Online, sell funeral caskets over the Internet. They discovered that they could not sell them in Oklahoma, Powers' home state, without being licensed by the Oklahoma State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors, a process which would require them to undergo, among other things, a 60-credit program of undergraduate training. Noting that very little of said program actually has anything to do with selling caskets, they sued the state, charging that the state board imposed "unreasonable and arbitrary barriers to entry into the casket retail market."

They lost; they appealed; they lost the appeal.

Judge Tacha of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals writes:

And Fritz Schranck observes:

Indeed. In the past five years, three bills to break up the Board's monopoly have been introduced into the state House, and none of them went anywhere. The Oklahoma Constitution, a monster of a document which manages, sometimes micromanages, everything that happens in the state, isn't particularly amenable to amendment, not so much for any inherent characteristics but for the general unwillingness of lawmakers to reduce the amount of oversight they're allotted.

In the meantime, if you want to be buried here, you'll get a quality box from a professional who is licensed by the state. And you'll pay through the nose for it.

(Update, 2:45 pm: Todd Zwycki isn't impressed either: "[G]iven the complete lack of any link between box-selling and embalming, it is surprising that the funeral home directors don't just go ahead and have their monopoly extend to all forms of box-selling, including cardboard boxes and luggage." Please don't give them any ideas.)

The first part is here.

Daniel Fears goes to trial on the 13th of September, and his defense team, from a firm which unabashedly promotes itself as specializing in "press-intensive" cases, will most likely try to demonstrate that young Mr Fears is utterly lacking in mens rea. Local prosecutors will have less razzle-dazzle at their disposal, which in a Court TV world might put them at some sort of disadvantage; however, I have to wonder just how much a jury of small-town Oklahomans is likely to be impressed by a passel of city slickers from Tulsa. Even as the population of the state gradually shifts toward the cities, the rural/urban disconnect remains very real, and it could conceivably work against the defense.

Maybe. We shall see.

As mentioned here Tuesday, the Oklahoma branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit to keep State Question 711 off the November ballot.

I haven't seen the text of the suit yet, and the Oklahoma ACLU has yet to post any details at its own Web site, but right now I'm thinking that their best hope is the ever-popular Mere Technicality: the measure calls for three related but discrete actions, and the state Constitution frowns on laws that do more than one thing at a time.

KGOU's Oklahoma Voices program devoted half an hour this week to the onerous task third parties and independents face trying to get on the November ballot in this state. Representatives of the Libertarian and Green parties were in attendance; Richard Winger of Ballot Access News was on the phone from San Francisco. Winger's figures as of today show the Libertarians on 43 state ballots and the Greens on 27, though as of this writing neither of them will be on the Oklahoma ballot.

I did learn a few things from this program. For one, while ballot access in this state has always been difficult, it became much more so after 1968, when George Wallace managed to pull 46 electoral votes and almost 13 percent of the popular vote nationwide. And a spokesman for the state Election Board points out that there's always the question of stalking horses: for instance, there was widespread suspicion in 2000 that Republicans were providing sub rosa support to Ralph Nader's campaign, on the basis that Nader could draw away votes from the Democratic candidate. The Libertarian official noted that it's the job of the electorate, not the Election Board, to determine whether a candidate is someone else's sock puppet.

Richard Winger has noted elsewhere that the Oklahoma law is going to have to be reexamined next year. Last month, the state Supreme Court ordered that a candidate for Congress be placed on the ballot as an Independent despite that candidate's Republican registration; the Tenth Circuit has previously ruled that states may not require specific (or even any) registration for Congressional candidates, so at the very least this clause will be struck. Says Winger:

Helpful, and long overdue, if you ask me.

Oklahoma City is divided into eight wards of roughly similar population (65,000 or so), each of which is represented on the City Council. Tulsa has a similar system with nine wards. Ken Neal, writing in the Tulsa World, says this system represents "ward politics of the worst kind," and wants to replace it with a convoluted mess where the nine wards will be consolidated into four, and the five other councilors will be elected at large.

"In effect," says Neal, the current system demands that councilors "are elected to try to put their district ahead of the overall welfare of the city." I don't live in Tulsa and don't have a grounding in Nealspeak, but I'll attempt a translation: "How can we do Great Things for this town if we keep having to piddle around with the petty needs of mere citizens?"

Ward politics by nature is fractious. For many years in Oklahoma City it was the three southside wards (3, 4 and 5) versus the rest of the city. But changing population patterns have changed the Council: parts of Ward 3 now extend as far north as NW 36th, and Wards 6 and 7 dip as far south as SW/SE 44th. Still, any city has limited resources, and this city in particular has to spread them over an incredible distance, so I'm inclined to think the residents of a ward would rather have someone sitting at the horseshoe who has some actual interest in that ward.

Michael Bates predicts the results of Neal's proposed charter change in Tulsa:

And I'm still concerned with Neal's tossed-off phrase: "the overall welfare of the city." If you can't get five councilors to buy such and such a proposal, maybe it's not so good for the overall welfare after all, huh?

The Oklahoma House has voted to impeach Insurance Commissioner Carroll Fisher, sending five articles of impeachment to the Senate.

A list of the articles of impeachment is here. The Senate will organize a court to try the impeachment within ten days; a two-thirds majority of the 48 Senators is required to remove Fisher from office. House Speaker Larry Adair (D-Stilwell) has named a six-person board of managers to prosecute Fisher, led by Frank Davis (R-Guthrie).

Fisher says he won't resign, and Irven Box, representing Fisher, says that it is unfair for the Senate to try the commissioner while he's facing criminal charges in district court.

Brad Carson has pulled even with Tom Coburn in the race for the Senate seat being vacated by Don Nickles. A poll of "500 likely Oklahoma voters" shows Carson at 39 percent and Coburn at 37 percent; calculated margin of error is 4.4 percent.

Michael Bates has been parsing the poll numbers, and this statistic he turned up is most interesting: Coburn leads in four of the five Congressional districts, but is trailing badly — 58 to 25 percent — in the Second, the district which he once represented and which Carson represents now.

I did a little poking around in the results [link requires Adobe Reader] myself, and found a few bits worth mentioning:

• State Democrats are evenly split on the Presidential ballot: Bush leads 43-42 among Democrats, with 15 percent still on the fence. (82 percent of Republicans are already in the Bush camp.)

• There's a gender gap, but probably not the one you think: Bush is doing better among women (63-25) than among men (56-33).

• The lottery (SQ 705) might actually pass: 57 percent said they'd vote for it. Democrats favor it overwhelmingly, and Republicans tilt slightly towards it.

• SQ 711, the anti-gay-marriage measure, is a two-to-one shoo-in.
  

Of course, anything can happen in the next few weeks.

Mike at Okiedoke has an interview with independent Senate candidate Sheila Bilyeu.

Pertinent quote:

Well, okay. I'm more of a benign-neglect sort of guy myself, but I'm also persuaded that there have to be other letters in our political alphabet besides D and R.

Bilyeu's official site is here.

The Supreme Court of the state of Oklahoma today refused to consider a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to remove State Question 711, a referendum which would bar same-sex marriage, from the ballot.

The ACLU had claimed the measure was vague and discriminatory; the Supremes were not impressed.

They were also not impressed with a request by embattled Insurance Commissioner Carroll Fisher to delay his impeachment trial, which was also denied.

Mike Clingman of the state Election Board says that more than 31,000 voter registrations have been received in the last two months, and projects that there may be as 80,000 more by the second of November.

His explanation? "The 2000 election taught people that every vote counts." What's more, the 2004 election features, in addition to the Presidential race, a statewide Senate race and a collection of hot-button state questions.

Of those 31,000, 55 percent registered as Republicans, though Democrats still have a numerical majority: as of the end of August, 2.03 million voters were registered in Oklahoma, 52 percent of them Democrats, 37 percent Republicans.

We've already examined just how liberal Brad Carson is, and the answer is "Not very"; certainly he's to the left of the average House Republican, but he's quite a bit to the right of the average House Democrat.

Meanwhile, Bruce has caught a Tom Coburn ad that apparently says otherwise:

Of course, it would be difficult to be farther to the right than Tom Coburn: beyond his point on the political map there are notations of "Unknown" and "Here there be dragons."

And I haven't seen this particular spot, but if this is the best they can do, they deserve to lose this seat.

It won't affect the criminal case against him, but Carroll Fisher, by resigning his position as Insurance Commissioner, will avoid having to go through the impeachment trial and becoming a larger footnote in Oklahoma history.

What is interesting here, at least to me, is that Fisher seems to be convinced that he'd get a fairer trial in the criminal court than he would in the Oklahoma legislature: "I will have a fair and level playing field, which I didn't feel I had in the impeachment process. It was too political."

Governor Henry, accepting Fisher's resignation:

Finding someone to fit the statutory qualifications, anyway, shouldn't be difficult.

If I seem to be bringing up third-party candidates rather a lot these days, it's simply because I continue to be frustrated by this state's tacit insistence that there is D, and there is R, and that nothing else matters.

Says J. M. Branum, an Oklahoma Green:

Which is the idea behind None Of The Above: to refrain, but in an organized manner.

If this number is substantial, it might suggest to the Legislature that our existing ballot-access laws are effectively disenfranchising a large number of voters.

And if you read this and think "I'd just be throwing my vote away," well, if you can't stand the thought of four years of Kerry or four more years of Bush, why would you vote for either?

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." — Rush, "Free Will"

Brad Carson, says this week's KWTV/Wilson Research Strategies poll, now leads Tom Coburn by five percentage points in Oklahoma's Senate race, the first time Carson has had a lead that exceeds the poll's 4.4 percent margin of error.

Four weeks ago, Coburn led Carson by nine percent.

Models for the new downtown Tulsa arena were unveiled today at a Rotary Club meeting, with a display to the general public to follow. Groundbreaking will be around the first of the year; the arena, which will cover four square blocks — Denver to Frisco, 1st to 3rd — is expected to open in 2007.

The design specifications for the Tulsa arena are here.

A botanical garden, says landscape designer Geoffrey Rausch, is like a museum — except that in the garden, the masterpieces are alive.

Conceptual plans for the Oklahoma Centennial Botanical Garden in Tulsa, to be designed by Rausch, were released this week, and a drive is already underway to raise $40 million for its construction. The garden site, 5323 West 31st Street North, covers 300 acres in the Osage Hills, and is adjacent to the Post Oak Lodge conference center. (Persimmon Ridge LLC, which owns this tract of land, has agreed to a 99-year lease at $1 to accommodate the garden.)

Proponents hope to draw 400,000 visitors a year once the garden opens in 2007, the 100th anniversary of Oklahoma statehood. I'll definitely be among them.

Tomorrow at 7 pm, Tom Coburn and Brad Carson (geez, where's Sheila Bilyeu?) will face off in a debate at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. Right now, it's too early to tell whether it will be essentially a repeat of this morning's Meet the Press.

One thing will be different, though: a demonstration. Around five-thirty, persons who are fed up with the severely-limited ballot access in this state, a law worthy, says onetime Oklahoma Libertarian Party chair Chris Powell, of a "banana republic," will meet on the east side of the Nigh University Center.

You can watch the debate live on KOCO-TV (channel 5) in Oklahoma City, or listen to it over KTOK radio (1000), which presumably will have a live Internet stream as well. How much attention they'll pay to the demonstrators remains to be seen.

After discovering that it would cost over $700 to fly from Tulsa to Springfield, Illinois and back, the OkiePundit has had it up to here with the airlines:

We're a little better off at this end of the turnpike — to the Illinois capital and back can be swung here for a smidgen under $300 — but my regard for the hub system, never all that substantial, completely evaporated when they told me once upon a time that I'd have to change planes in Houston to fly to Philadelphia. (And actually, that price can be beat from Tulsa if you buy far enough in advance, but you'd still have to change at Chicago O'Hare and then backtrack to Springfield, which strikes me as just slightly insane.)

Of course, regular readers know I'd just as soon drive, even all the way to Philly, but that's a different issue entirely.

Barbs, accusations, counteraccusations, and more barbs — what more could you want? Last night's Tom Coburn-Brad Carson debate was wild and woolly, more heat than light, but the candidates did manage to stake out some differences in position.

Best barb, in my opinion, by Carson: "We've sent people to Washington who did nothing for Oklahoma. But we've never sent anyone to Washington, D.C., who makes doing nothing for us their platform."

The candidates will debate again on the 25th of October in Pace Auditorium at Tulsa Community College.

Same old place as it ever was: on the line. For OU-Texas weekend, the governors of the states have a "friendly" wager on the outcome of the game, and traditionally it's been a side of beef.

This year, there were protests. Vegetarian groups in central Oklahoma and in Austin, Texas asked that the bet be revised, and indeed in 2003 Governor Henry had put up 150 lb of corn meal instead of the usual grill fodder. Not this time.

And really, an event billed as the "Red River Shootout" is no place for arugula, if you ask me.

Former OU football coach/demigod Barry Switzer has endorsed Brad Carson for Senate, an announcement which is far more important than I think it deserves to be; I was seriously thinking about not mentioning it here, but Wilson Research Strategies, which has been handicapping the Senate race, says that 16 percent of voters who chose Brad Henry for governor in 2002 said that Switzer's endorsement had influenced their choice. So Barry carries a lot of weight, even today; Chris Wilson of WRS says that "it's probably the second-best endorsement you could get, after Bob Stoops."

Bob Stoops had no comment, but John Hart of the Tom Coburn campaign sniffed, "Barry Switzer has a track record of endorsing liberal trial lawyers."

The Tulsa World points out in an editorial today [link requires Adobe Reader] that Brad Carson got the highest possible rating from Americans for Better Immigration, a group which seeks to reduce the number of immigrants; Tom Coburn, on the other hand, received a less-than-mediocre D-plus.

There's just one problem here: it's not true. Had anyone from the World bothered to read ABI's ratings in full — which Michael Bates actually did — it would have been excruciatingly obvious that both Carson and Coburn got exactly the same overall rating: a B-plus. And it's not like the details are hidden away; even without using Bates' links, I was able to find the scorecards in a matter of seconds.

What's really weird is that the editorial wasn't intended to cast a pleasing light on Carson, but to castigate the Republican National Committee for a Coburn ad about immigration; the ABI scorecards were merely a sideshow. Yet the World was perfectly willing to go on the attack with a complete misstatement of ABI's positions. What were they thinking? As lapses in editorial judgment go, this is so utterly amazing that I have to wonder if the World has been raiding CBS News to staff its editorial board.

As Tulsa wrestles with trying to lure people downtown, Michael Bates explains what it takes:

We've figured this out down here. Oklahoma City has increased its police presence in Bricktown and has installed a police substation in a rented storefront, pending the completion of a full-time police building on East Main. The Walnut Avenue bridge is closed for now, but will be rebuilt. And if you'd rather not walk all over Bricktown, there's always the trolley.

Of course, we provide places where you can feel a sense of danger in your car, too: just try to get through the Pennsylvania Avenue/Memorial Road/Kilpatrick Turnpike intersection.

What is most interesting, I think, about this list of Green Party positions on this fall's ballot initiatives, is that it's deliberately incomplete; on three of the nine State Questions, the party will "make no statement." J. M. Branum explains:

Which is fine with me. There's no compelling reason why a political party should have a stance on every conceivable issue.

Mr Branum notes further:

He cites SQ 713 as a particularly heinous example, and indeed 713, which raises the tobacco tax while cutting the top rate of the income tax, is a powerful argument for the metaphor of legislation as sausage.

Vandals tagged Brad Carson's Tulsa campaign office at 1404 S. Utica with graffiti Sunday night; among the inscriptions were "Carson lies" and "Leave Tulsa alone" and, perhaps most horrifying, "liberal".

The vandalism was discovered Monday morning; campaign volunteers have been scraping off the graffiti.

"Froth on both sides of the aisle," I said.

At 5 pm today, there will be a Ballot Access Forum at Oklahoma City University, featuring Thom Holmes, Rachel Jackson and Chris Powell, from the Constitution, Green and Libertarian parties respectively.

The forum will be held in Room 102 of the Sarkeys Law Center on the OCU campus. It's free, and it's open to the public.

Mike at Okiedoke has compiled from OSHA records a list of the most dangerous workplaces in Oklahoma.

What makes them "dangerous"? OSHA sent this letter to some 13,000 employers using these criteria:

No place I have ever worked in this state appears on this list. There do seem to be a lot of nursing homes and Wal-Mart stores, though.

The local GOP is now issuing dual yard signs: they're the same size as the standard-issue signs, but they carry both Bush/Cheney and Tom Coburn indicia. I caught two of them this evening within a mile of each other. Are the Republicans (or, for that matter, the Democrats) doing something like this in other areas?

Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson has told the Associated Press that the filing of the Medicaid reimbursement form for Dr Tom Coburn's 1990 operations on Angela Plummer constituted "fraud," though no charges will be filed as the statute of limitations has expired.

Coburn treated Plummer's ectopic pregnancy by removing both her Fallopian tubes, even though only one was affected, leaving her sterile. Since Medicaid did not pay for sterilization procedures for patients under twenty-one years of age — Plummer was twenty — Coburn reported only the removal of the tube containing the embryo.

Edmondson says that had Coburn described his actions in full, he would have received no reimbursement from Medicaid, and that his omission was intended to make sure he "got paid for something that he would not have been paid for had he submitted the claim accurately."

Plummer eventually filed suit against Coburn, claiming she had never consented to the sterilization, but did not pursue the matter.

Meanwhile, Coburn's rival for a hotly-contested Senate seat, Brad Carson, is already running ads waving the "fraud" description around.

Persuaded as I am that wording treatment descriptions in the way that pries the most money out of insurance companies is a true 21st-century art form, I'm inclined to dismiss Edmondson's claims as so much white noise. On the other hand, Coburn's deposition, in which he states that he had asked Plummer not to discuss the sterilization with Medicaid, is more troubling, at least to me.

(If you'd just as soon not go through NewsOK.com, the Carson campaign has posted the entire AP story here.)

Brad Carson and Tom Coburn are scheduled to mix it up again, this time at the Performing Arts Center at Rose State College (I-40 at Hudiburg Drive, Midwest City), and beforehand, there will be another demonstration for ballot-access reform. Be there at 5 pm. (I'll be recovering from a dental appointment and will be in no mood to scream at passersby.) KFOR-TV will carry the debate live at 7 pm.

(Update, 8 am: This week's WRS poll gives Coburn a three-point lead, within the poll's 4.4-percent margin of error.)

Just arrived at Surlywood, courtesy of the Oklahoma County Republican Party: a cover letter signed by outgoing Senator Don Nickles, names and photos of GOP candidates, and two copies of the official state absentee-ballot application form.

A nice idea, I'd say, though I think I might have been more impressed had they addressed it to me, rather than to the person who had owned the house up until 1996, fercryingoutloud. (Has this place been occupied by Democrats for the last eight years?)

"All politics is local," they say, and last night's Carson/Coburn debate, in which the dominant theme proved to be "What can you do for Oklahoma?", would seem to corroborate that generalization.

Meanwhile in Tulsa, a news story on the proposed state lottery almost turned into a debate in its own right, featuring lottery proponent Pat Hall and longtime opponent Rep. Forrest Claunch (R-Midwest City).

Color me officially undecided on both of these for now.

This week, a Very Special Vent: I take on this year's state questions. As Harry Kim might have said, I favor seven of nine.

James Inhofe (R-OK) got to the Senate in 1994 on a platform of, in his words, "God, gays and guns," a phrase which has since become unofficial shorthand for the alleged motivations of the Oklahoma electorate. And on the off-chance that he was actually right, something that happens less often than you'd like with Inhofe, 2004 should be two-thirds of a banner year at the polls.

With no fewer than three State Questions on gambling, and a fourth dealing with Demon Tobacco, those with a mind to stamp out vice will have plenty to do on November's ballot. What's more, there's a referendum on same-sex marriage. I think it's a safe bet that the God and Gays segments will be present and accounted for.

Guns, however, have turned into a non-issue. The National Rifle Association sent along a copy of its Oklahoma Voter Guide — you can read it here — and while they note elsewhere that the Democrats have a faux sportsman at the top of the ticket, once you get down to the state level there's not a lot of difference in the candidates. Both Brad Carson and Tom Coburn picked up A ratings from the NRA, as did all the major House candidates except Bert Smith in District 5, who didn't return the questionnaire. In the state legislature, there are very few incumbents or challengers in either party who scored as low as a C. I interpret this as a simple statement: "We like our guns, now leave us the hell alone."

Still, even with guns off the table, turnout, I think, will be tremendous.

Like most states these days, Oklahoma has a list of registered sexual offenders. Unlike most states, we're about to register violent offenders as well. (Only Montana maintains a similar list.)

The new law, named for murder victim Mary Rippy, specifies that offenders must register with area law enforcement within three days after entering the state or after moving to a new location. They must be continuously registered during the term of their sentences and for ten years thereafter, and are not permitted to work near children, or for any person or business working on school premises.

The law is not retroactive, so the list begins fresh on the first of November.

Mayor Cornett called last night. Or rather, his voice on tape called last night, and as such things go, it was a very professional job, fitting perfectly into the space alloted on my voice recorder. (Cornett's years of broadcasting and video production have obviously served him well.)

Anyway, the Mickster was making a pitch for State Question 707, which extends tax-increment financing beyond a single fiscal year. He pointed out that all the usual municipal and Chamber of Commerce types were solidly behind it, and that its passage would be a Good Thing. Since Cornett's own Oklahoma City is arguably the master of tax-increment financing, albeit most of the current projects occurred before he moved into the middle of the horseshoe, Cornett's arguments could have carried some weight — if he'd actually explained what SQ 707 would do, or if he'd bothered to mention so much as a single project that would benefit from it.

Then again, I rather suspect that explaining what state questions actually do is considered detrimental to their passage. Here's the ballot language:

Now I wouldn't have expected the Legislature to have written it like this:

But it would have been a pleasant change from the standard legislative boilerplate, which seems to be predicated upon the notion that the electorate is dumb as a post.

Which, come to think of it, it may be: somebody on the daytime version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire yesterday (at the $8,000 level!) was unable to identify the home state of Senator John Kerry, meaning either that this was a very old rerun or that Karl Rove forgot to send out the checks one week.

Political bits from around the state:

• Tom Coburn's campaign people announced Monday that the Republican candidate for Senate was endorsed by nine tribes among Oklahoma's Native Americans. And by "nine," they evidently meant two.

• Water-cooler argument overheard this morning: "I don't bother to research the issues or the candidates; it's a good thing that I don't vote."

• KFOR-TV attempts to explain the state questions in plain English.

• Tom Coburn leads by three percentage points in the KWTV/Wilson Research Strategies poll, but the Tulsa World/KOTV poll shows Brad Carson with a 7-point lead.

• The number of state requests for mail-in absentee ballots is running about 25,000 higher than in 2000.
  

And remember: when news breaks, we scatter the pieces.

A 527 operation called Citizens for a Strong Senate, largely funded by San Francisco Bay bankers Herb and Marion Sandler, is running some anti-Tom Coburn ads locally, and one of them wound up in my mailbox. Listing a series of issues Coburn reputedly voted against during his six years in the House, the ad characterizes the physician as Dr. No.

Pity they couldn't get Ursula Andress for the ads.

(Comments about "fighting in the trenches" will be summarily deleted.)

TheTulsan.com has its endorsements up, and for some reason they urge reading my commentary on the state questions, even though we differ on our recommendations.

More to the point, they're quite a bit funnier. In disapproving of SQ 714, which adjusts the threshold for the senior real-estate valuation freeze, they offer the following:

Well, maybe, if I live to be 118. (Should I tell them I'm barely into my fifties? Naw. Why make it worse?)

Nineteen states, including Oklahoma, have a retention ballot for appellate judges: under the name of the court, the ballot reads, "Shall [judge's name] be retained?" The voter gets to choose Yes or No.

Dr. Bob Darcy, Regents professor of political science and statistics at Oklahoma State University, says that we don't know much of anything about the judges, but we vote to retain them as a measure of support for the judicial system.

Can anything be done? Should anything be done? Appointments for life will obviously remove the judges entirely from oversight by the electorate. The state bar maintains a Council on Judicial Complaints, but the Council's operations generally fly well under the public radar. Once in a while an interest group will try to stir up opposition to a judge who has issued a ruling unfavorable to them, but seldom does it make any difference: judges are routinely returned to office with about a 2-1 majority. Before I took up the mantle of Sort of Political Blogger, my own rule of thumb was to vote against anyone I'd ever heard of, on the basis that if the judge had somehow gotten into the news, it likely wouldn't have been good news.

Maybe there's a better way, but for the moment, I'm stumped.

US Senator

I don't know which is more disheartening: the fact that reliably-loose cannon Tom Coburn (R) is still at large, or the fact that once-sensible Brad Carson (D) has reached new heights of shrillness in his efforts to get elected. My own political leanings are somewhere in between the two, and my fondness for gridlock would normally push me in Carson's direction — no way the GOP is going to lose the House this year, which means that a Democratic-controlled Senate would have great amusement value — but geez, what a whining kvetch Carson is these days, and even Coburn's lunatic claim that parts of Little Dixie are overrun with busty lesbian ninja pirates, or some such nonsense, doesn't make Carson look any saner. Under these circumstances, the least I can do is pick someone who isn't either of them, which leaves me with Sheila "Mobile Receiver" Bilyeu (I), and frankly, I fear for a world in which I can be left with Sheila Bilyeu.

Corporation Commission

I have no real gripe with incumbent Denise Bode (R) — her longtime ties to the oil and gas industry are hardly news — but challenger John Wylie (D), who publishes a newspaper in Oologah and who, as a reporter, covered public utilities for many years, might shake up the often-somnolent Corp Comm, which I suspect might be good for all of us.

House District 5

Who is Bert Smith (D)? Damned if I know. But he's not Ernest Istook (R) either, and with Frank Robinson off the ballot, not being Istook is probably enough to give Smith the nod. (And how many other districts can offer Bert vs. Ernie? I tell you, there are reasons to love this place.)

State House District 87

Don't get me wrong. I like Trebor Worthen (R), even if he is the evil spawn of an incumbent. But John Morgan (D) is a friend and a neighbor, and, well, I do have one of his yard signs. Besides, Worthen's most recent mailing showed entirely too many signs of "Well, maybe this will work," noting that Morgan is presumably a gay-marriage advocate (I dunno, though he did get an endorsement from GayOKC.com) and worse, Morgan is (gasp!) a lawyer. And I do know this much: John Morgan doesn't fret if you spit watermelon seeds on his shoes. For now, let's leave Trebor Worthen on his side in a cool, dark room until he matures.

Judicial Retention (eight seats)

As noted before, I'm not overly fond of retention ballots. Applying my usual rule — if his name rings a bell, vote him down — all these guys get a pass, because I don't recognize a single one of them.

Sheriff

I'm still peeved with current Sheriff John Whetsel (D) for trying to wangle a sales-tax increase for his little empire. On the other hand, I know nothing about Stuart Earnest (R), unless this is the same Stuart Earnest who used to be a county commissioner, in which case he's really, really old.

County Clerk

There's one thing I like about incumbent Carolynn Caudill (R): she caught hell for supporting Jim Roth, once her deputy, for county commissioner, what with Roth being gay and worse, being a Democrat, and she shrugged it off. Enough, I think, to keep her around, especially since I haven't seen any compelling reason to vote for challenger Lillie R. Hastings Buckner (D).

I reserve the right to change my mind between now and Tuesday, but I don't think I will.

An anti-Tom Coburn piece showed up here today, courtesy of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, castigating the GOP candidate for having had kind words for the national sales tax known familiarly — except, apparently, to Democrats — as the "FairTax". The reputed Coburn quotes are here.

The print ad features a typical collection of supermarket purchases, each with a price tag, and each with the notation +23% TAX below the purchase price.

Similar pieces have shown up in Kansas, attacking Kris Kobach, running for the 3rd District House seat, and also in Minnesota, where the target is Mark Kennedy, 6th District incumbent. What they all have in common, of course, is that nowhere is it mentioned that the adoption of the "FairTax" is contingent upon the abolition of the Federal income tax. Of course, the income tax is subject to all sorts of Congressional fiddling and diddling, and taking it away will leave the Democrats (and, yes, it is true, rather a large number of Republicans) with fewer tools to bend the populace to their wills, quite apart from the economic benefits we might accrue without their permission.

And while we're on the subject: if these people are actually paying $3.29 for a loaf of Home Pride Whole Wheat Butter Top, or $5.99 for what appears to be an 18-ounce jar of Skippy peanut butter, as pictured in the anti-Coburn piece, I'm damned glad they don't do my grocery shopping.

It was cold and blustery and damp, but I've lived here long enough to know that it takes glare ice to make much of a difference in turnout, so I figured I'd pull in at about 6:40. About fifty folks had had the same idea, only slightly earlier, and there was, at least among this group, considerable sentiment for opening the polls at 6 am instead of 7.

Still, things worked with commendable efficiency; I spied one spoiled ballot — replaced on the spot with a new one — and one voter who was shunted to the side while someone researched his address change, but everyone else breezed through the two lines (divided alphabetically), and a dozen booths, plus three sit-down areas for wheelchair users, accommodated the crowd with, if not exactly ease, at least a general lack of hassle. The box counts the ballots as they're inserted, and mine, number forty-five, went into the slot at precisely 7:15.

And I was glad to have done the deed, and gladder still that I hadn't waited until this evening, when things are likely to get seriously hairy and, weatherwise, quite a bit wetter.

The City Council is apparently going to shrink by two: Ward 4 Councilman Brent Rinehart is leading in the race for District 2 County Commissioner, and Ward 8 Councilman Guy Liebmann looks like a lock for House District 82. Mayor Cornett will have to call special elections to fill whatever vacancies are created.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are jumping the gun, but only a little: Tom Coburn declared victory over an hour ago, and about 9:00 the GOP decided that they'd won control of the state House. So far, the numbers are continuing to go their way.

Seven of the nine State Questions will pass, and 707 and 713 are leading, but just barely.

The State Election Board is posting their latest numbers here.

(Update, 10 pm: 707 is falling behind; 713 is starting to lose steam.)

(Update, 11:15 pm: 707 is back on the plus side; 713 is stabilizing at around 52 percent. Trebor Worthen has won House District 87. John Whetsel will return as Oklahoma County Sheriff, and Carolynn Caudill will return as County Clerk. Bert Smith didn't beat Ernest Istook, but he got a lot more votes than I thought he would. And, well, Sheila Bilyeu pulled over 70,000 votes, which means that a lot of people wanted nothing to do with either Brad Carson or Tom Coburn. Carson's concession speech, incidentally, was a lot nicer than any of his ads.)

Mike Clingman of the Oklahoma State Election Board reports that 1,463,875 votes were cast in the 2004 general election, beating the 1992 record by seventy thousand.

Oh, we have a few provisional ballots: 2,603 of them. I leave to someone more involved than I the question of why Ohio, with three and a quarter times the population, should have fifty times as many provisional ballots.

State Question 711, which barred same-sex marriages and which passed Tuesday by a three-to-one margin, has now been challenged in court. Two couples from Tulsa have filed a lawsuit in US District Court which seeks to overturn both the Oklahoma statute and the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Apparently this suit has been in the works for some time, but the plaintiffs decided to wait until SQ 711 was passed.

Senator James Williamson (R-Tulsa), who sponsored the legislation in SQ 711, says he thinks it will stand up to the court's scrutiny; the suit will probably be heard some time next year.

The bottom line on ballot access in this state is still "It takes too many signatures," and the resources that must be devoted to gathering those signatures are considerable. The obvious question, therefore, is "How many signatures would not be 'too many'?"

One suggestion: one percent of the votes cast in the last general election, which would be a shade under 15,000. Still sounds like a lot, but getting a Presidential candidate on the 2004 ballot required over 37,000 signatures, so a one-percent threshold should certainly be easier to reach.

My own thinking, right this minute, calls for a flat 10,000 signatures to gain party recognition, maybe half that for a Presidential candidate, though I'm willing to entertain other ideas. The hard part, of course, will be persuading the legislature, which is made up entirely of members of major parties, to go along with changes like this.

BatesLine has a funny piece about cranky liberals in Tulsa, a fraction of which seem to feel that but for the grace of God — well, were there actually a God, you know — they'd be right at home in Manhattan:

Of course, if they want a real taste of the New York experience in the Bloomberg era, they're welcome to come down the turnpike to Oklahoma City, where we fine people for dropping sunflower seeds on the street.

The Oklahoman had a few charts in the Sunday edition (not on the Web site yet) that struck me as interesting. It's no secret that here, as in other states, voter registrations were way up this year; they report that in 74 of the 77 counties, there were more new Republicans registering than new Democrats, and in two counties — Alfalfa and Harper — the number of registered Democrats actually dropped. Only in Oklahoma County (which includes most of Oklahoma City) did new Democratic registrations outnumber new GOP registrations, though they were pretty close in Tulsa County.

Still, even after that GOP upsurge, only 19 counties have Republican majorities; the Democrats have majorities in 58. And yet not one county gave more votes to the Kerry/Edwards ticket than to Bush/Cheney.

It's anybody's guess what will happen in 2006. I don't see any of the five House members (four Republicans, one Democrat) being replaced — Senator Inhofe will only be four years into his current term — but the GOP has control of the state House for the first time in ages between now and then, and Governor Henry, a Democrat, will be up for re-election in '06.

Today the State Election Board will certify the election results, which means that any recounts have to be completed by today.

And it appears there will be one: for State House District 78, apparently won by Jeannie McDaniel (D) over David J. Schaeffer (R), 7892 to 7858, a difference of thirty-four votes. There were approximately 29 provisional ballots, and Michael Bates reports that there were some ballot-scanner issues in one precinct.

Of course, what's important here is that we actually can recount these ballots. Says Bates:

And we could improve our level of voter authentication just by looking at the voter-ID cards issued by the state. (I always present mine, mostly because I have a fairly common name and having the card handy makes it unnecessary to ask for middle initial or street address or other identifying factors, but that's just me.) But by and large, the system we have is pretty darn good, and what's more, it's pretty darn cheap; you can buy a whole lot of low-tech scanning devices for the cost of a single touch-screen.

(Update, 8:45 pm: Michael Bates reports that Jeannie McDaniel did win House District 78, by a margin of 24 votes. And there's a second recount, in Senate District 32 — Comanche County — which hasn't been completed yet: Randy Bass (D) led Kenneth Easton, 9809-9774, though so far Bass' lead has been cut to 30.)

(Update, 8:10 am, 10 November: The Bass-Easton recount finished with Bass ahead by 51, 9854-9803. The Lawton Constitution doesn't apparently archive stories, but for now you can read it here.)

Dr. William S. Spears (OSU '62), founder and CEO of Energy Education, Inc., has bestowed upon his alma mater the largest gift in the history of Oklahoma State University. The amount of the gift was not disclosed, but it was sufficient for OSU to rename its School of Business after Dr. Spears; The Oklahoman reports that it exceeds the $70 million given to the school by oilman T. Boone Pickens (OSU '51), for whom the school's football stadium was renamed this year.

Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK 3) is apparently on a list of candidates to replace Ann Veneman at the Department of Agriculture.

Lucas has announced that he's "not holding his breath," but at least he has some plausible credentials for the job: he's on the House Agriculture Committee, heads up the Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Rural Development, and Research, and when he's not in Washington he actually farms (and grazes cattle) in rural Roger Mills County.

Nineteen states, including Oklahoma, get by with a single license plate, mounted in the back. I don't know anyone here who complains about that, but apparently there's some sentiment among law enforcement for adding a tag up front. Herewith, an Okiedoke quote of a Dallas Morning News column:

And of course your law-abiding convenience-store robber isn't going to do anything to obscure that front plate.

Being the cranky curmudgeon that I am, I persist in thinking that it's bad enough I have to have one plate. And that plate is there as a registration indicator for the state; law-enforcement applications are inevitably secondary.

The Oklahoman is reporting today that during the plea negotiations for his state trial, Terry Nichols admitted that he had had a major role in the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, and that he was unaware of anyone else besides himself, Timothy McVeigh, and Michael Fortier who had any connection to the terrorist act.

Who was in on the plot? Nichols stated:

Prosecutors apparently could not use Nichols' statement against him at his state trial, since he did not testify. Judge Steven Taylor had issued a bar to releasing this and other documents connected to the trial; no one has yet said how the statement was disclosed. Oklahoma County District Attorney Wes Lane said he wasn't the leaker, but he wasn't bothered by it either:

Nichols has been tried twice: first on federal charges, including seven counts of murder, for which he drew life without parole; later, the state of Oklahoma tried him for the deaths of the other 161 bombing victims, for which he drew life without parole. Michael Fortier is currently serving twelve years for knowing about the bomb plot and not telling anyone, for assisting McVeigh with weapons management, and for lying to the FBI after the fact. Lori Fortier, Michael's wife, was never charged. Timothy McVeigh was executed at the Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana in 2001 for his part in the bombing.

Just when we'd gotten used to YourOklahoma.com, the state decided it needed a newer new Web site, and presto (actually, probably fairly lento, at least behind the scenes), there was OK.gov.

And already there's a flap over it: the first version of the front page had pictures of, and links to, both Governor Brad Henry and Lieutenant Governor Mary Fallin, but some time on Day One, the Fallin references had vanished. Since Henry is a Democrat and Fallin is a Republican, this is an open invitation to conspiracy theorists; Fallin apparently complained to Scott Meacham at Finance, who spearheaded the design effort. Meacham says that there should be links for all statewide officials, or for none, and that's the word he gave to the Web designers. (Henry, of course, is still featured prominently.)

Sometimes you just want to scream in the general direction of 23rd and Lincoln.

Sally Allen, to my delight, gives the new University of Oklahoma alcohol policy the derision it deserves:

Then again, this is the state that gave us "non-intoxicating" 3.2 beer.

This past year's Senate Bill 1529, passed by the legislature in March and signed by Governor Henry in April, permits municipal employees of cities with populations of 35,000 or more to unionize. (This would include Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Norman, Lawton, Broken Arrow, Edmond, Midwest City, Enid, Moore, Stillwater, Muskogee, and maybe Bartlesville, which recorded 34,748 at the last Census; it does not cover firefighters and police, who have their own collective-bargaining rules.)

The law took effect on the first of November. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees almost immediately announced that they would seek to organize Lawton, Enid, Bartlesville and Moore city employees, and employees of the Oklahoma City Zoo Trust, who are not covered under the agreement between Oklahoma City and AFSCME Local 2406.

Since then, Enid has filed suit to block the implementation of the law, arguing that it's unconstitutional because of that population standard; Lawton City Council has authorized a suit; Bartlesville, on that population cusp, would like to be excluded; and the Zoo Trust has won a restraining order against AFSCME until such time as the District Court decides whether its employees meet the definition of "municipal employees" in the new law.

The new House will be under Republican control, and Marian Cooksey (R-Edmond), in what seems to be her first official action, has introduced House Bill 1002, which would repeal the measure outright.

Four hundred miles down I-35 is the city of Austin, the capital of Texas, a place where I have lots of roots, and a place that prides itself on its weirdness. Nothing wrong with that, say I, but I've been back a few times since my days at The University (yes, that one), and while there are aspects of it I dearly love, it never struck me as being, well, all that weird.

J. M. Branum, who's lived both here and there, makes a case that Oklahoma City might be weirder than Austin:

And lots more reasons. I don't think that Oklahoma City is destined to be, well, the "next Austin," but I don't lie awake at night wondering what I'm missing by living here either.

Daniel Fears, convicted of shooting up Sallisaw in October 2002, was sentenced today to life without parole. During the rampage, apparently prompted by a complaint about Fears' driving, two townspeople were killed and eight others wounded. As predicted here, counsel for the defense had attempted to show that Mr Fears was suffering from a mental disorder.

Previous coverage:
Berserk? We got that
Sallisaw shooting update
Fears on trial
Fears on trial (part two)
Delayed follow-ups

Some people actually fall for this:

A chap from San Antonio named Alan Louis Chavis apparently got enough "pure profit," even at the discount price of $25, to operate two customer-response centers, which he was careful to locate in faraway Oklahoma. It didn't save him; in September, prosecutors in Oklahoma put him on trial for mail fraud, and yesterday Chavis was sentenced to 19 years and three months and ordered to forfeit $250,000.

One down, however many thousands to go.

Tuesday's election in Oklahoma City will feature the measure to increase the hotel/motel room tax from 2 percent to 5.5 percent — not including the sales tax, which they conveniently forgot to mention in their promotional materials.

But that's not the only ballot issue you may see in the city. If you live in the Midwest City/Del City school district, whose boundaries [link requires Adobe Reader] include some parts of eastern Oklahoma City, you'll also be voting on a ten-year bond issue for Rose State College, which would raise $7.65 million for a facility for Tinker AFB civilians attending specialized classes.

The really interesting ballot measure in the area, though, is outside the city. In Choctaw, Mayor Don Griffin is facing a recall, and the story reads like a bad television drama. Two challengers, Robert Mabra and Randy Ross, will be seeking to unseat Griffin.

The Oklahoman reports this morning that despite low mortgage-interest rates, 31 percent of black and Hispanic customers failed to qualify for conventional home loans during 2003, versus 23 percent of American Indians, 15 percent of whites and 12 percent of Asians.

This does not indicate any pattern of discrimination among lenders: the practice of "redlining" — refusing to make loans in presumably-undesirable areas — is essentially extinct. It does, however, indicate that black and Latino borrowers tend to have poorer credit scores. (Not that mine is all that wonderful.)

While no one has made a case that the scores themselves are discriminatory, it's reasonable, I think, to assume that not everyone understands the scores, and the factors that contribute to them, equally well. The Oklahoma Homebuyer Education Association, a joint venture of lenders and community groups, is working to upgrade people's knowledge of what it takes to qualify for a mortgage.

Lenders, to their credit, have been coming up with alternative mortgage programs to reach more buyers. (Disclosure: I took advantage of one such program myself, a pilot program by a major lender, directed at people with okay credit scores but iffy prospects for substantial down payments.) The upside, of course, is more homeowners, which means more people with tangible assets, and which, because people have more of a stake in their community, ultimately means better neighborhoods. This may be somewhat easier in Oklahoma, with its relatively low-priced housing stock, but the principles apply everywhere.

Michael Bates applauds the idea of a new central library in Tulsa, but he's not all that happy with the location:

I don't believe anyone ever considered building the new downtown Oklahoma City library anywhere other than, well, downtown. While motor-vehicle access is a bit cumbersome, the facility, despite a certain similarity to buildings used by the United Federation of Planets, fits nicely into the city's notion of an Arts District along the western edge of downtown: Hudson Avenue southbound will also take you to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (at Couch Drive) and StageCenter (at Sheridan Avenue), and the spring Festival of the Arts is conducted largely in the middle of Hudson.

Tulsa's growth over the years has been largely to the south and east, so downtown Tulsa is actually rather far removed from the geographical center of the city. Apparently it's been suggested that a Central Library be more, um, central. I don't think so, and neither does Mr Bates:

Our big worry down here right now is finding places for the two new branch libraries. (We have the funding: the bond issue for them, and for upgrades at three existing branches, passed in 2000.) Right now, residents of far northwest Oklahoma City have to go at least as far as The Village (Pennsylvania north of Britton Road) or Warr Acres (63rd and MacArthur) branches, or to Edmond, and things aren't much better in the southwest quadrant. That new southwest library will be in Cleveland County and will be operated by the Pioneer Library System out of Norman; the 50,000 or so Oklahoma City residents in Cleveland County can get cards at both Pioneer and Metro [Oklahoma County] systems.

Top Ten possible new names for the city of Lawton:

  10.  Arridextra
    9.  Spentshell
    8.  Cache Heights
    7.  Offlimits
    6.  Faxon Farms
    5.  Sillville
    4.  Cooler Than Altus
    3.  Wichita Springs
    2.  Dustbunny
    1.  Lawlesston

(Tip of the sombrero to Mike H.)

Oklahoma's seven Presidential electors officially cast their ballots for George W. Bush today, mostly because they believed in the man, and perhaps partly because they'd be fined a thousand bucks if they didn't.

Minnesota electors, under no such strictures, cast nine of the state's 10 votes for John Kerry, the tenth unaccountably going to John Edwards, an action which no doubt will frost Timothy Noah no end.

I don't normally pay much attention to the Tulsa World; they've never been known for having a surplus of clues anyway, and most of their really absurd statements end up dissected on BatesLine.

This morning's editorial page [link requires Adobe Reader], however, is silly enough to merit some pokes from my end of the turnpike. On the failure of a measure to issue bonds for the improvement of the Tulsa County library system, the World came up with this meaningless comparison:

What, was the library system shutting down? Of course not. It's not even suffering. What was turned down was a bond issue to finance some improvements, the sort of thing they haven't seen in Tulsa since, oh, 1998 or so. Michael Bates explains:

(In case you're curious, the library system accounts for 5.32 mills of the Tulsa County tax rate; it's 5.20 in Oklahoma County.)

But those crapheads in Oklahoma City — why, they've taxed themselves a whole lot more than that, says the World. Well, yes, we did. Mere taxation, though, didn't produce the growth we're enjoying. We put $360 million into MAPS, but the private sector has forked over more than a billion. The $700 million for MAPS for Kids won't produce that kind of private investment, but bringing city schools up to the quality level expected (if not always achieved) in suburban schools will help keep the city growing at nearly the same rate as the 'burbs, while other central cities stagnate or contract as families with children flee. (Yeah, I know: vouchers. We'll get to them some other time.)

In other words, taxation is just a means to an end, not an end in itself. The World doesn't seem to grasp that idea:

This is eerily reminiscent of the post-election Democratic mantra "We didn't get our message out." Does it not occur to the World, or for that matter to the Democratic establishment, that the problem wasn't the distribution of the message but the message itself?

Just for icing on the cake, here's a bit from the second editorial on the page, concerning the distribution of federal highway funds:

Um, the Crosstown Expressway is Interstate 40. And lions aren't generally inclined to share.

I've stayed off the David Deming story, partly because our paths have crossed a few times, mostly in the context of Usenet, and I think it's reasonable to say that