The Obama Campaign is denying any knowledge of the fellow in the “Mitt Romney Killed My Wife” video, and Jim Geraghty (via email) responds by suggesting that [t]he new hold music when you dial the Obama campaign [ought to be]:

NSFW insofar as the lyrics are actually understandable without a written text.

Yo man
Yo
Open up man
What do you want man?
My girl just caught me
You let her catch you?

How could I forget
That I had given her an extra key?
All this time she was standing there
She never took her eyes off me

Western Outdoor News: COMMISSION PRESIDENT CELEBRATES A SUCCESSFUL HUNT – California Fish and Game commissioner Dan W. Richards travelled deep into the wicked terrain of Idaho’s Flying B Ranch to fulfill a long-held goal. “It was the most physically exhausting hunt of my lifetime. Eight hours of cold weather hiking in very difficult terrain. I told the guides I appreciated the hard work. They were unbelievably professional, first class all the way,” he said. Richards said he took the big cat over iron sights using a Winchester Centennial lever action .45 carbine. Asked about California’s mountain lion moratorium, Richards didn’t hesitate. “I’m glad it’s legal in Idaho.”

The LA Times reports that the president of the California Fish and Game Commission has been successfully hounded out of office by the usual West Coast crowd of left-wing extremists for the outrage of legally taking a trophy mountain lion on a hunt in Idaho. Residents of California have been regularly stalked, occasionally mauled, and even killed and eaten by mountain lions in unprecedented numbers of incidents since hunting lions in the Golden State was banned by whacko-supported initiative in 1990.

(Mountain Lion encounters & attacks data)

The California Fish and Game Commission was created a century ago (1909) by sportsmen to manage and regulate the state’s wildlife resources. Its operations and programs are funded by license fees and taxes on sporting goods paid exclusively by hunters and fishermen.

But, in California today, the tyranny of the fruits-and-nuts supporters of the democrat party is so far-reaching, their intolerance and bigotry concerning other people’s lifestyles and convictions so great, that the president of the state Fish and Game Commission has been hounded out office by a six-month-long campaign of vilification based on his being guilty of legally hunting!

Daniel W. Richards was replaced as president of the California Fish and Game Commission on Wednesday, seven months after he sparked a storm of controversy by killing a mountain lion during a hunt in Idaho.

Although the kill was legal in Idaho, California has outlawed the hunting of mountain lions for decades. More than 40 state legislators called for Richards to resign in March, saying he showed poor judgment in killing the cougar when the practice is opposed by most Californians.

At the time, Richards defiantly refused to resign from the commission, saying he had done nothing improper. Even though the commission voted to elect Commissioner Jim Kellogg as president Wednesday, Richards plans to remain on the commission until his term expires in January. …

[Michael] Sutton, an executive with the Audubon Society [who was at the same time elected Vice President of the Fish and Game Commission], said later that the killing of the lion and Richards’ comments defending it were factors in his decision to vote to replace Richards.

“It was pretty clear that Commissioner Richards had lost the confidence of the majority of the commission,” Sutton said. “Most of us feel it is inappropriate to use the presidency as a bully pulpit for your views.”

The president of the State Fish & Game Commission is supposed, in California, to be out of line when he uses his office to speak in favor of hunting.

The presidency and control of the commission will be passing out of the hands of the sportsmen who pay for it and into the hands of Environmentalist granola-crunching ideologues eager to implement new policies based on junk science, Animal Rights theories, and hostility to firearms and the field sports.

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The LA Weekly describes the politics of the situation:

[A]lthough Fish and Game commissioners haven’t explained specifically why they decided to vote Richards down from his throne today, it was clearly a symbolic move to kill the human who killed the beast.

“The president of the commission should be someone who has the confidence of a majority of his peers,” Mike Sutton, vice president, told the Mercury News leading up to the vote.

Richards was playing the feisty right-wing ideologue at the beginning of this battle, but he has since became strangely resigned to his ousting.

He looked on as the commission changed its own internal election policy in May so that they might replace Richards. And today, a Fish and Game Commission spokesman tells us that Richards himself took part in the unanimous vote to elect Commissioner Jim Kellogg as his replacement.

The ex-prez, appointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger (surprise, surprise) in 2008, will remain on the commission until his term ends in six months. But from there, he tells the Mercury News: “I think there is a zero chance that Jerry Brown will appoint me, so it doesn’t matter what I think. He has his hands full with shoplifters and other thugs in the Legislature.”

Pretty morbid, right? Let this be a lesson for all trigger-happy Republicans who dare to dream of swimming against California’s blue tide: We’ll eat your grin for dinner.

While American Sanya Richards-Ross was accepting the gold medal for winning the 400-meter dash, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt was giving an interview.

The world’s fastest man, a Jamaican who won the 100-meter dash, stopped what he was doing to listen to the Star-Spangled Banner.

Instead of continuing to talk to the interviewer, he turned around, pointed at the flag, and indicated to the reporter that he would like to watch in silence.

Video of Bolt’s interview has gone viral.

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Of course, not everybody feels the same way about the American National Anthem.

and

Washington Times story

Glenn Reynolds

Congratulations to the all-time performance champion of all conservative blogs on the 11th anniversary of its start of operations. Instapundit is still the best.

Brian Phillips singles out for competition the National Anthems, played during Olympic Medal Award Ceremonies, basing his awards on four bases:

1. Transcendence of Historical Suffering (Freestyle)
2. 200m Inculcation of Hard-Won Optimism
3. Compulsory Tingliness
4. Volksgeist, the Expression of the Spirit of the People

The Welsh National Anthem described as sounding like “pipe organs mating in a forest” was regretfully excluded from consideration, what with Wales lacking sovereignty, independence, and all that.

The entries from Nepal and Montenegro were pretty remarkable.

Priorities USA Action, an independent expenditure PAC, with roughly $21 million dollars to spend provided by Dreamworks, a bunch of unions, some law firms, McKinsey (!), and a number of liberal-owned companies, produced the hardest-hitting ad directed at Mitt Romney so far.

The attack ad says:

“When Mitt Romney and Bain shut down the plant, I lost my health care. A short time after that, my wife became ill. I don’t know how long she was sick. . . . I took her to the Jackson County hospital, and admitted her for pneumonia, and that’s when they found the cancer. By then it was stage four. . . . She passed away in 22 days.”

AllahPundit responded:

Romney stopped doing work for Bain in 1999; the steel plant in question here closed down in 2001; Soptic’s wife passed away in 2006; and yet, Romney’s somehow culpable. Perfection. You know what’s really interesting about this spot? It’s not even a health-care ad. It’d be sleazy under any circumstances, but there’d at least be a concrete policy angle if Burton was selling it as an argument for, say, single-payer, to decouple insurance from employment. He’s not. There appears to be no actual policy argument here at all, unless The One now opposes layoffs on principle, for fear that someone somewhere might be left without insurance. Is that where our very pro-business president — seriously, just ask him — is now at? As John Sexton says, does this mean O himself is on the hook until 2014 for any deaths that resulted from GM dealerships being closed in 2009? I thought workers bore some responsibility to find a new job with insurance after they’re laid off, but if he wants to take the blame for human tragedies at Government Motors, fine by me.

Even CNN describes the ad as “not accurate.”

Hat tip to Sarah Jenislawski.

Risque postcard of nude woman smoking by Julian Mandel.

F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s 1936 story, “Thank You For the Light,” was just published in the New Yorker.

Mrs. Hanson was a pretty, somewhat faded woman of forty, who sold corsets and girdles, travelling out of Chicago. For many years her territory had swung around through Toledo, Lima, Springfield, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, and her transfer to the Iowa-Kansas-Missouri district was a promotion, for her firm was more strongly entrenched west of the Ohio.

Eastward, she had known her clientele chattily and had often been offered a drink or a cigarette in the buyer’s office after business was concluded. But she soon found that in her new district things were different. Not only was she never asked if she would like to smoke but several times her own inquiry as to whether anyone would mind was answered half apologetically with “It’s not that I mind, but it has a bad influence on the employees.”

“Oh, of course, I understand.”

Smoking meant a lot to her sometimes. She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically. She was a widow and she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings, and more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes, so smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to John W. Brewer.

Wikipedia edits July 30-August 6

Michah L. Sifry has a suggestive indicator.

The Romney campaign wants you to download its mobile app to be among the first to find out who Mitt is going to pick as his running mate, but if past history is any guide, you might want to instead be looking at Wikipedia — and whether any of the leading contenders’ entries are being suddenly brushed up.

Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page was updated at least 68 times the day before John McCain announced her selection, with another 54 changes made in the five previous days previous. Tim Pawlenty, another leading contender for McCain’s favor, had 54 edits on August 28th, with just 12 in the five previous days. By contrast, the other likely picks — Romney, Kay Bailey Hutchison — saw far fewer changes. The same burst of last-minute editing appeared on Joe Biden’s Wikipedia page, Terry Gudaitis of Cyveillance, told the Washington Post.

Robert Loveless Wilderness Model with Amber stag scales.

Last April, a new documentary film, Robert Loveless — An American Legend was premiered in Los Angeles.

The DVD version is now available.

I bought a copy and watched it with enjoyment over the weekend.

The film does a fine job of telling the strange story of Bob Loveless, a poor boy from Ohio with an extraordinary talent for design, who began making custom knives on shipboard while working as a sailor on the Great Lakes, selling them at first through the old Abercrombie & Fitch. When the free-spending and quality-obsessed late 1960s arrived, Bob Loveless’s custom knives were quickly recognized as something quite extraordinary and became for many collectors an obsession.

Production came nowhere near meeting demand and the prices being paid for Loveless knives on the re-sale market went out of control. Loveless himself naturally resented the fact that his customers were commonly walking out the door and re-selling his work for a few thousands of dollars profit.

Loveless never significantly increased production, though he apparently essentially turned all the actual knife-making over to a friend named Jim Merrit. But he did jack his prices up in an ongoing, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to deter profiteering.

I talked to Bob Loveless about ordering a knife myself, back in the 1980s. He was surly and hostile, and spoke of 5-10 years wait on orders, and was asking, at that time, for $100-an-inch for a knife. It sounded as if both prices and delivery dates were completely arbitrary. Loveless was clearly intentionally discouraging ordering. He told me that nobody really needed a Loveless knife, and it was clear he was sick of the pressure from all the fame and fandom.

I thought that kind of pricing was ridiculous. The uncertain time interval was too great, and I didn’t like Loveless’s hostility toward customers so I gave up on the idea of placing an order. Watching the film, I see that he eventually started charging $5000 and up per knife and that still didn’t deter orders.

The movie made it clear that Bob Loveless lost interest in knife-making, and got well and truly fed up with fame, but like everybody else he enjoyed the money that poured in and indulged himself, buying guns, watches, cars, and planes.

As the years went by and Loveless grew old, his crankiness, eccentricity, and displays of arrogance increased, but he was also capable of great gestures of kindness and generosity.

I guess the Loveless story really demonstrates that success is a bitch goddess who has to ruin everything she touches. Once Bob Loveless became really famous, only filthy rich collectors (aka suckers) and friends already wired into his personal network would ever get their hands on a Loveless knife. Loveless became rich in a small-scale way, but the knife-making stopped being fun for him a long, long time ago.

But Bob Loveless was such a great designer that his style was adopted by half the custom knife makers working today, so practically identical imitations are everywhere.

Watching Jim Merrit making Loveless knives was fascinating. I couldn’t help noticing that the Loveless shop only made knives via stock removal and then sent the blades outside to be heat-treated. By contrast, other renowned makers like Moran, Randall, Dennehey, and Seguine forged all of their larger knives and did everything, including heat treatment, themselves.

Whatever one’s reservations, one is obliged to admit that Loveless’s knives are all absolutely beautiful. They are all essentially variations on the same design, but what a marvelous design, and what superb variations they are. There can be no doubt that Bob Loveless was unsurpassed as a custom knife maker. In the originality and intrinsic merit of his designs, the breadth of his influence, and in the level of admiration from customers and the prices his work has commanded, no one else has ever come even close.

Hat tip to BuzzFeed.

This striking photo of a Pittsburgh street at night in 1900 kind of reminded me of the gritty Pennsylvania coal town where I grew up. We didn’t have steel mills though, only coal mines.

From Shorpy.