5 Comments

Roger

When you start agreeing with Gary Bauer on Gay Marriage is when I’ll begin to wonder if the end of the world is near.

Seriously, I know you hate labels, but an educated Jew hanging out with Michael Ledeen, finding common ground with Gary Bauer, and remember, Gary Bauer supported John McCain in 2000, the defacto choice of Neo-Cons (They do love Bush now). Well I’ll just say, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck… you know the rest. NEOCON! GO ahead Roger, admit it, I’m not ashamed.

Irving Kristol said the innate moralist within all Neo-cons leads to much common ground with Social Conservatives, in fact according to him, more with them then any other group. I read that as saying without Social Conservatives the moralist ideas we espouse would not have the political weight and power to carry forward. Agree with Gary when you can, be polite when you don’t, but be nice to people like Gary Bauer because the bottom line is Neo-cons need Social Conservatives on board to help with their aganda. The days of vilifying Social COnservatives are over. (Israel needs them too)

Roger,

I’m afraid you and Gary are both missing the forest for the trees. Casinos were never going to resuscitate life on the reservation–they would open up channels of commerce and in some cases (my native upstate NY region, for one) allow tribes to buy back lands appropriated from them over the centuries. The Onondaga Indians are now the largest landowners in Central New York, and are indeed enjoying a renaissance of sorts. Good for them. I hate gambling, but just about everyone who visits my family wants to go to Turning Stone in Oneida. Whatever.

The bigger issue for me (and one even the geniuses at South Park can’t render laugh-worthy) is the ongoing, monumental mismanagement over at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, nearly ten years after a federal judge reamed them for “losing” billions of dollars in federal payments over the course of several decades. I read just last week that some 95% of a $100 million grant to the BIA cannot be accounted for (don’t trust my numbers, but the sum was huge). There’s no excuse for this mess, and frankly were I an American Indian I would say, hey, we’ll fix the casino problem as soon as YOU fix the BIA.

A decade or so before the opening of Foxwoods casino, the sole occupant of the Pequot reservation was a solitary old woman living in a trailer. It wasn’t a reservation like you see in the west, with a group of ethnically related people sharing the same culture. The rest of the “tribe” that now enjoy the largesse of the largest casino in the world have at best dubious ties to the actual Pequot indians. If the subject interests you I recommend Jeff Benedict’s “Without Reservation”; even if the subject doesn’t interest you you’ll find the book tells a compelling story about special interest politics.

There’s no excuse for this mess, and frankly were I an American Indian I would say, hey, we’ll fix the casino problem as soon as YOU fix the BIA.

Clio, I am an American Indian, and I agree — do something about the BIA. Give us back our multiple billion dollars.

Otherwise, let us run the casinos and we’ll buy the damn country back.

Let us see here.

Investors are required for a venture. After the workers are paid the investors get the biggest share of the returns.

This is different from the movie business how?