The FBI El Paso corruption case keeps humming along. The latest conviction, that of Antonio “Tony” Dill, a lobbyist, made headlines last week. He plea-bargained out, admitting to bribing a member of the El Paso County Commissioners Court. Link chart (below) is appropriately updated.

I’d link to a good El Paso Times article from May 29th on U.S. District Judge Frank Montalvo’s disclosure that ‘more than 80 “persons of interest” have been linked to the investigation, including 35 past or current public officials, 13 lawyers and three current or former judges,’ but the Times’ extraordinarily-excellent archive system hides articles faster than the Air Force hid the Roswell alien bodies, and you can’t read the article out of the archives, or Google it, to save your alien body-hiding life.

Nonetheless, the center-of-gravity in this Venn Diagram-like arcade of corruption appears to be the odd construct known as the El Paso County Commissioners Court.

Newspaper Tree, which has a functioning archive system, reports on the Dill plea here.

The Old Prospector asked me by cellar phone the other day what the heck a lobbyist does anyway. “How does he make money off of urging people to do stuff?” OP asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” I said. “But if I urged you to lay off the cheladas at Acetunas would you give me five dollars?”

I couldn’t tell if the gurgling, snorting sounds coming out of the phone were laughter or anger.

Meanwhile, back on May 12th, Newspaper Tree’s David Crowder was trying to, in more cerebral terms than the Times staff had done previously, argue for more openness in the case. Well, that’s 3213 words a reader will never get back in his or her lifetime. OP told me on the phone that anytime media argues for more access, it just means they’re lazy.

“I know a thing or two about digging for gold,” he said, in a conspiratorial tone of voice that suggested he was talking to me out of a stall in the men’s room of a nearby bar on Doniphan. “And I ain’t never asked the guvmint to pint me towards the goal. I found what I found through my own hard work.”

I’d link to another Times article on Dill being out on bail quicker than you can say “Commissioners Court,” but hell, it’ll be “archived” soon enough.

“Archiving” by the Times is just another way citizens get El Paso’d around here.

OP later texted me from Acetunas. He was between sets in a karaoke showdown, having just won the narcocorrido competition before heading into the single-elimination Bee Gees Are Back retro-round. ‘Don Kirkatrick is blowing thng out of prportion.’ OP still hasn’t mastered texting on his Blackberry.

I texted him back: ‘Gt on ur mule and go hme.’ I’m no Blackberry hero either.

So here we go with another updated El Paso Corruption Link Chart:

The Old Prospector stopped by my place yesterday. I knew right away he’d been biding time in Rosa’s Cantina. Again. So I went to the shed and pulled the canvas wrap off the jug, and we had a snort or two of Early Times, for New Times’ sake. Just to keep his spirits up.

Told me he’d been down East, in Key West, Florida, doing some night tarpon fishing and eating oysters on the half-shell. Based on his gait, I suspected he’d been fishing for Wild Turkeys as well.

OP told me he’d heard news on the flats off Key West about a $600,000 “traffic study” being commissioned by the ELP City Council. Said he got it off Marine Band 16, the distress channel. Asked what I knew about it.

Well, I don’t know much, I said. All I know is what I read online. I hear Britney Spears is in custody court again.

OP snorted, then snorted a sniff of my priceless brew, which is priceless because no one will pay for it. He said he sympathized with Eddie Holguin on the East Side, despite OP’s mule-strong prospector prejudices, but mainly because he and Eddie liked to play the horses together at Sunland Park.

“He’s got a point,” said OP, eyeing a pothole on Redd Road that increases its diameter by an inch every time a city bus passes over it.

“You know,” said OP, “there’s a hole 30 miles outside of Houston that just opened up. “I reckon it’s all the oil and gas they done drilled out of the area.”

He looked at me with a keen eye.

I got the hint.

I said so much as how everytime an El Paso politician gets a gleam in his eye, we get a sinkhole in our wallets.

“Zactly,” said OP. “They can spray paint all the lines in the road they want, but don’t mean nobody’s gonna come and work on the road.”

I thought about the now-fading spray paint on the street in front of my house, and offered OP another snort.

Then I casually mentioned the name Wayne Grinnell, casually because OP had taken out his Winchester Model 1892 Trapper to clean it. “This fella Wayne Grinnel,” I said, before shutting up real quick-like.

“He was around in 1981, or thereabouts,” said OP, eyeing me like a target on a rifle range. “He’s an apologist for New Mexico. Thinks they’ll overtake El Paso in population, money and economy.”

“So he’s crazier than an outhouse rat,” I offered.

OP didn’t answer, but he also didn’t swing the Winchester toward me. I took this as a positive, and cautiously lifted a glass to my lips.

Then I asked about Avocadoan and its observation on NIMBYness.

OP spit. “NIMBY!” he exclaimed. “Nobody knows how rich or poor the Upper Valley is! Half the people there are Caucasoid elites who would be middle-class and blue-collar in any major city. Yet here they think they’re as rich as Monte Carlo expatriates. Hell, I once ran an investment firm in the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco fer seven figures a year — and you don’t see me slinging mud at the jornaleros. The other half are working barber shops and doing landscaping as a second job. Problem is, Ann Morgan-dash-Lilly can’t figure out which lobby to pander to: the fantasizing whites or the up-and-coming browns.”

I left OP to stew in his own ethnic color palette for a minute while I checked my stocks online. When I headed back out to the tack house, he was already saddled up, and moseying out the gate in his usual fashion of nearly falling off while expertly guiding his horse to the nearest bar.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said, with only a slight slur. “When’s your next batch of hooch due?”

“In 2011,” I said, hoping to see him them.

Check out this cartoon. Then check out the landscape of El Paso. The cartoonist is so taken with the horror of the planned border fence (whether real or virtual) that s/he doesn’t see the irony in their own back yard.

El Paso is littered with rock walls. Practically every home has a wall surrounding its back yard. Businesses are divided by them. Streets and schools enjoy the coolness of the shadows they provide. FBI agents lurk behind them, looking for the next bribe-taking local yokel politician stumbling toward a wad of cash.

Fact is, El Paso is the embodiment of the sentiment expressed in this cartoon: it seems people think that some problems in El Paso can apparently be solved by building rock walls everywhere.

If they don’t think that, then why do they build so many of them?

–Walls to keep out news of suicidally-drunk underage teenage drivers screaming down Country Club at three in the morning.

–Walls to keep us from seeing the legion of abused and neglected pets in our unthinking neighbors’ yards.

–Walls to keep us from viewing the latest TAKS scores from our next generation of geniuses (or bribe-takers).

–Walls to hide us from the view of white and African-American beggars at street-corners, selling candy and bullshit at Airway & Montana, Fred Wilson & 54, or Redd & North Desert.

–Walls to keep out the latest bad news of the antics of the Commissioners Court.

And one more thing. The author of the article, listed as a Professor Emeritus at Sul Ross, should go back to school. His analogy to the Berlin Wall misses on a main point: it was East Germany that erected that wall, not West Germany. To bring his fantasy to reality, then, it would be Mexico building the wall on the Southwest Border, not the United States.

Well, “emeritus” means “retired” in academic circles, and for that, we can come out from around our own wall, and be thankful.

Here are some updates to the ongoing El Paso corruption case.

– Raymond Telles Pleads Guilty
– Socorro Independent School District Added to Link Chart
– El Paso Community College Added to Link Chart

According to The American Chronicle, five of the seven EPCC trustees are to be indicted.

With all that juicy goodness, here’s the updated link chart with the above added. Clicky on the thumbnail for full-sized corruption goodness:

To be fair, the El Paso Times covered the local Democrat caucus mess — you know, the confusion, poor planning, reactions of irritated voters, and the general infighting and raucousness that typically accompanies anything associated with the Party of the People. Because locally, and nationally, the people in that Party are usually confused, out of step, irritated, pugnacious and raucous.

In other words, if you want to understand why so many people in the world can’t stand the Ugly American, you have to understand what underpins the Ugly American. It ain’t the stench of Chico’s Tacos food on his/er lips, that’s for sure.

Well, it’s not like Americans hide it anyway. The whole Dem mess — locally and nationally — is widely played out in MSM for all the world to see (and avoid). Somehow, Americans have built a nation that not only no longer seeks to hide/avoid/change its juvenile habits, but a nation that rides passports and airplanes overseas to celebrate them in the face of people who are often more politically-astute, and who don’t wear tennis shoes to the Louvre.

You could Google it. Just look at the mess Howard Dean & Co have created in Michigan and Florida. Talk about a lack of vision, i.e., a vision that Hillary would end up with something less than an annointment as the Dem candidate.

If the Dems can’t plan three months ahead for contingencies like Obama, how are they going to plan for fighting terrorism three years from now?

I suppose they could just eliminate tax breaks, so there’s a war chest to cover political shortsightedness.

Oh wait. That just happened, though surely a veto is coming.

So the Times covered the El Paso Democratic Caucus Ca-ca, and it did so here. Adriana Chávez wrote all about it. There was poor organization (though that’s really an El Paso thing, not limited to Democrat movers-and-shakers), whacked-out screaming Obama supporters in their filthy politically-charged T-shirts (tsk, tsk), and “mass confusion,” whatever that means these days.

OK — it means when sun-loving, Chicos taco-sucking locals have to play on a state or national level, they don’t have the tools, training, protocol or education to compete.

Outsiders visiting El Paso already know all that. For that matter, carpetbagging hero wannabes, like Dee Margo, and his stagemaster Guv Perry, a man who never met a wayward border town into which he wouldn’t like to stick his political pinky, know that.

Possibly to help soften the rising (?) sense of urgency over local Democrat incompetence, Times reporter Ramon Bracamontes launched a journalistic missile on March 6th, acknowledging and then glossing over the mass hysteria confusion during the caucus, noting that voter turnout in El Paso was the highest in 40 years. Good for El Paso, though we’ll see how good it is in November, when either Hillary or Obama is dispatched, and memories (or not) of the caucus still ring in the brainpans of the honest, hard-working, raise-taxes-now-dammit blue collar crowd that always votes Democrat on the border, no matter how much that hurts.

Addendum: Of course, at the time of the writings, the Chico’s Tacos shack local tradition on McRae hadn’t been shuttered, so the public was looking for something to think about, and local MSM outlets were looking for something to write about.

Let’s give appropriate props to the El Paso Times for filling in a news gap.

(golf claps)

And now the Times has gone above and beyond local expectations by filling folks in on the real political story of 2008. While the Democrat meltdown over Michigan and Florida, and superdelegate defections, is making national headlines, El Pasoans are now (thankfully) keenly aware that the GOP in nearby Alaska is having a meltdown. (Hat-tip: Dan Joling, AP writer, appearing in your local rag, courtesy of editor Don Flores.)

And now you know why you shouldn’t be upset about that whole El Paso Democrat caucus thing anymore.

Whew. For a minute there, we were worried that the Democrat Party was off-track.

UPDATE: Stop the ACLU notes a “moonbat meltdown” at Daily Kos.

And, Burnt Orange has Hillary worked up over Texas caucuses, with a clear threat to cause a delay at the state convention. You see, Obama has more caucus delegates — whoops.

Well, well.