Max and I were sitting in his den watching a news report on BP’s successful effort to put a cap on their little runaway gusher and sipping a couple of dark beers. The commercial came on so Max turned to me and said, “It appears that the ghost of John Connally has been hard at work in Minnesota ?”

I looked at him a minute and decided my ears were playing tricks on me again. “ Whattaya talkin’ about?”

“You recall that the story that John Connally being the one that went to Duval County and talked those dead Chicanos into voting for Lyndon Johnson for the Senate, put him over the top?”

“I remember that was the rumor. I don’t think it was ever officially confirmed,” I said.

“You didn’t expect it to be did you?” Max laughed. “Any you must not have read about the large number of felons that illegally voted in the Minnesota senatorial election, huh?”

“Felons? What are you talking about?”

Max smiled. “It appears that there is a watchdog group called the Minnesota Majority that smelled a rat in that Minnesota recount that reversed the outcome of the senatorial election. This bunch has been combing through records comparing the lists of those who voted with criminal rap sheets. They found that at least 289 convicted felons voted in Hennepin County , the state’s largest county and another 52 voted illegally in Ramsey County where St. Paul is located. The head man, Dan McGrath, says that they counted only conclusive matches and that the number of felons voting in those two counties alone exceeds Franken’s victory margin”

“Good grief!” I exclaimed. “What a rat’s nest! What are they going to do about it?”

“They went to Hennepin County and told ‘em what they’d found and the officials there just stonewalled ‘em.”

“What a surprise,” I said sarcastically.

“But over in Ramsey County , the District Attorney, name of Phil Carruthers, took the whole thing very seriously and said the Minnesota Majority “had done a good job in their review.” He’s asked for 15 investigators to be hired to pursue the investigation. Carruthers said, “So far we have charged 28 people with felonies, have 17 more under review and have 182 cases still open.”

“You don’t think it’ll change anything do you?” I sneered.

“No, but it’s nice to know somebody cares about the integrity of the system,” Max replied.

“That’s a warm and fuzzy alright,” I said. “But it just proves, once again, you can’t beat the Democrats in a recount when they’ve got the state attorney general on their side.”

“I know,” he said, nodding. “They found out in Florida that if they didn’t have the Attorney General in their pocket, they weren’t going to win any recounts.”

“Taught ‘em to choose their battlegrounds more carefully, huh?” Max asked.

I just nodded and drank my beer.

Max was going to the gun store to get ammo for his Glock and I went along for the ride just to see what was the latest in the world of gunsmoke.

As we were cruising down I30, Max asked, “Did you see where Hugo Chavez has pulled another dirty trick on his people?”

“No,” I replied. “What did he do this time?”

“He moved the official U. S. dollar exchange rate from 2.15 bolivars to 4.3 bolivars. He effectively wiped out the savings and purchasing power of the people he brags about representing.”

“Good grief!” I exclaimed. “That had to hit hard. Venezuela imports damn near everything they use. That’s going to inflate prices like crazy.”

“Oh, no!” Max replied with a wry grin. “Chavez already thought of that. He promised to arrest any merchant adjusting prices.”

“How logical that guy is!” I observed. “With a grasp of economic theory like that, he’s a veritable Latin Milton Friedman, isn’t he?”

Grinning, Max replied, “So, the long-suffering Venezuelan people are faced with a Hobson’s choice. They can have even more shortages than they already have or they buy on the sly at inflated prices. The irony of it is that most of them were already on the edge, just barely getting by.”

“That ain’t all,” Max went on, sighing. “The government instituted rolling blackouts across the country because their generating power is going to hell in a basket.”

“Oh, no! What happened?”

The official position of the government is that they have had a long drought that’s left the water levels at the Guri Dam at critically low levels. And the country gets 70% of its power from that dam.”

“You mean to tell me a country swimming in oil hasn’t constructed a bunch of back-up generating capacity?”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Max said, shaking his head. “They’ve had chaos. In Caracas , people were stuck in elevators and the predators had a field day in the dark streets. The per capita murder rate in Caracas was already one of the highest in the world and it got worse. He stopped the blackouts in Caracas , but they are still going in the rest of the country.”

“Next, they’ll be running out of oil,” I said, jokingly.

“Funny you should say that,” Max snorted. “They still have plenty of oil, in the ground anyway. The problem is that Chavez has expelled or seized the assets of foreign oil companies like ExxonMobile and Conoco-Philips. There’s no one left to properly maintain the oil fields. On top of that, he fired the skilled employees of the state oil company because he didn’t like their politics and put his political cronies in charge. In 1998, Venezuela was producing 3.3 million barrels of crude a day. In January, it was down to 2.4 million and heading south.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I wonder if those economics professors in those big Ivy League schools brag about Venezuela ’s successes in their experiment with socialism”

“You kidding?” Max chuckled. “When the country finally collapses, they’ll just say what they always say, “The right people weren’t in charge.”

“Gosh, where have I heard that before?” I wondered aloud.