A Rational Animal

Shot from a few years ago at Three Rivers Petroglyphs in south central NM

Okay, kidz, here’s the deal:  I’m devoting today and tomorrow almost exclusively to pulling together the background story (New Mexico edition) on the prosecutor purge.  I’ll post throughout both days, but I’m spending a great deal of time pulling links to sources, etc., so if you don’t see an update when you visit, check back in an hour or two.

I think I said once that this goes back to the 2004 election.  That’s true, but really a misstatement on my part.  This goes back to the 2000 election, and it was a constant undercurrent throughout the first [illegitimate] Bush term.  It seemed to peak in the 2004 race; after Kerry conceded [also illegitimately; that was not his decision to make when we knew what had happened in Ohio], it seemed to disappear.  However, a lot of us kept expecting to see fallout - and the prosecutor purge is it.  Serendipitously for this pack of criminals, staging the purge now and in this way gave them the chance to stop several investigations (like Carol Lam’s) dead in their tracks.  It has thus expanded to encompass a whole host of administration goals - goals that are as illegitimate as they come.  Strike that; goals that are as criminal as they come.

Anyway, some of the coming posts may seem a bit disjointed in the larger scheme of things.  Bear with me; they’ll all tie together nicely in the end.  And for those of you who are blogging yourselves on these issues, please:  Take these stories and run with them!  Use them as a guide to digging up what happened in your own states.  Spread these accounts far and wide.  Because I guarantee you, these eight prosecutors are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.  This pattern and practice exists in every single contested state (in fact, probably every single state, period).  Since the MSM won’t do their jobs, it’s up to us (following the lead of the incredible TPM guys) to make sure that the Bush/Rethug Titanic smashes to smithereens.

First up:  Bush BFF Mickey Barnett. 

Before we get into the story in depth, I thought it might be helpful to post the cast of Rethug characters.  Most of them are unknowns on the national stage, despite being local heavywieghts within the GOP.  Some have (as far as I can tell) only bit roles, while others snagged the leads.  These are only the players who come immediately to mind; as we delve further into this, others may make an appearance, so don’t treat this as an exhaustive list.  Without further ado:

Adair, Rod:  NM state senator from Chaves County (county seat:  Roswell); one-third of NM’s axis of evil.

Barnett, Mickey:  Albuquerque-based lawyer and lobbyist; confirmed in 2006 as Bush’s nominee to the U.S. Postal Service Board.  Former legislative aide to U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici; former state legislator; second third of NM’s AoE.

Dendahl, John: NM GOP 2006 candidate for governor and former state GOP chair.  (He has left the state since his dismal performance as a gubernatorial candidate.)  Tight with the AoE, he was anointed state GOP chair at their urging after they ousted Ramsay Gorham (see below).

Domenici, Pete:  U.S. Senator for more years than anyone can remember.  Formerly regarded as a largely honorable pol from the wrong party; now seen as a pimp for the administration and a rent boy for the AoE.  Early political employer of Barnett (see above).

Foley, Dan:  NM state representative from Chaves County (Roswell), BFF of Adair, and third third of the NM AoE.  Also tight with Tom Krumland (see below) and willing to blow $20K in taxpayer-funded military resources to plug the opening of his buddy’s new business, then lie about it.

Gorham, Ramsay:  Former chair of the NM GOP, ousted in a very ugly, very public intra-party battle by the axis of evil.  Gorham, a woman and (by some accounts) a relative moderate, was insufficiently vicious for the AoE’s collective taste, and thus needed to be replaced by their buddy Dendahl, a likeminded bombthrowing bigot.

Krumland, Tom:  Roswell Republican and auto dealer; upon expanding his corporate empire in 2005, he and BFF Foley cooked up a scheme to get the NM National Guard to "donate" a flyover during his grand opening "ceremonies" (said 2-minute flyover, occurring at a time when the news was full of reports of U.S. soldiers in Iraq dying for lack of up-armored HumVees and adequate weaponry, costing the NM taxpayers $20,000).

Krumland, Linda Chavez:  Wife of Tom Krumland, above, and fellow traveler among Roswell’s rabid Rethugs.  During the 2004 election, Chavez Krumland launched a supposed nonprofit (without appropriate registration and reporting) called New Mexicans for Honest Courts, which apparently consisted solely of Chavez Krumland herself and worked to destroy judicial independence in the state.

Pat Rogers:  Albuquerque Rethug lawyer tight with the AoE; reportedly wants Iglesias’s job; long-time whiner about nonexistent voter fraud, nonexistent activist judges, etc, and author of recent ABQ Journal hit piece on Iglesias.

Weh, Allan:  Current executive director of the NM GOP (although maybe not for long, after putting his foot in it a couple of weeks ago); rent boy for the AoE and Dendahl.

Wilson, Heather:  U.S. Representative from NM’s 1st CD; in 2006, beat Democratic challenger Patricia Madrid by a mere (and suspect) 800 votes.  Wilson previously got into trouble as head of state’s division of Children, Youth, and Families when she physically removed a file from the office’s archives that allegedly documented an incident of child abuse by her husband.

I’ll update this with links later, and I’ll also add information about the players in future posts.  This should get you started for now.

[Ed. note:  This is the basic intro of a post I started several weeks ago.  I’m posting this portion of unchanged, despite the fact that some of it is now clearly outdated (e.g., the reference to Josh Marshall’s failure to recognize that the voter fraud issue is the key).  I’m also not going to dig up the internal links again, becuase it’s going up purely to lay the groundwork for the series of individual posts to follow later this evening.  Those posts will include links and references.]

Josh Marshall and Paul Kiel have been all over this story from day one, and they’ve compiled a hell of library on it.  Marshall insists that the ouster of Carol Lam is at the heart of the scandal, because her investigations into Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Jerry Lewis, and their compas were hitting too close to home.

I’m sure that he’s right, to the extent that Lam’s investigation was what made it necessary to oust her now, and I’m also sure that the others were fired simultaneously in part to provide cover for Lam’s dismissal.  But only in part.  What Marshall has missed - and certainly the MSM have all missed, except the occasional glancing blow - is the fact that this goes far deeper than current corruption investigations.  It’s a wholesale attempt to roll back minority access in the country and to deny the vote to entire classes of people - and it’s absolutely breathtaking in its fascism and bigotry.

How do I know this?

Because during the 2004 election, I was at ground zero for the Rethug voter intimidation operation in New Mexico.  And make no mistake:  What this is about, on the broader scale, is nothing less than attempting to disenfranchise African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, legal immigrants, persons with disabilities, senior citizens, young voters, and even active-duty members of the military.  Why?  First, because with the exception of the last category (and now, it applies to members of the military in increasing numbers), members of those groups tend to vote Democratic.  And secondarily, because members of those groups have had the termerity to believe that they’re "entitled" to the rights that go with being "Americans" - and their interests don’t jibe with those of wealthy white Xtian male Rethug elites.

And considering what happened during the 2004 election, "Rethug" is more apt than most people know.

Those of you who are regular readers of ARA are also regular readers of other progressive sites, and I know you know about the attempts to intimidate minority voters in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states in 2004.  The flyer in the image above was a classic passive-aggressive version of such activity:  All over the country, flyers showed up on poles and windshields in minority neighborhoods - and in some cases were actually mailed to voters - as part of a widespread disinformation campaign.  The less malignant of these flyers simply gave the wrong date for Election Day.  Most included dire warnings about unpaid parking tickets, child support arrearages, overdue taxes, etc.; they told voters that if they owed such debts, they would not be allowed to vote.  They also threatened them with jail if they dared to show their faces at their polling locations.

I’m not even going to bother here trying to unpack all the racism in those stupid flyers.  We all know what they were:  unmitigated shit, bigotry in its rawest form.   There were other efforts, too - rerouting of traffic in Florida; police roadblocks set up a mile from the polls to check the licenses of black drivers; the presence of police dogs at polling places; attempts to create enormous delays at locations serving senior citizens, whose health wouldn’t permit them to wait on their feet for hours in the sweltering humidity in Florida or freezing rain in Ohio.

But what didn’t get much coverage nationally was the orchestrated attempt to suppress the vote here in New Mexico.  And despite the occasional reference to Rethug allegations that NM USA David Iglesias and WA USA John McKay failed to prosecute voter fraud cases, the media have ignored the fact that this was a GOP-administered pattern and practice in 2004.  And I guarantee that once you start overturning rocks in each of the jurisdictions where a USA was purged, you’ll find that same pattern and practice somewhere.

Obviously, I can only speak from experience with regard to NM.  But I can tell you that David Iglesias was a walking target:  We Dems, knowing his party loyalty and ties, quite rightly distrusted him, particularly since certain local Rethugs were overtly working to suppress the vote under the bullshit rubric of "voter fraud."  But we were also surprised to hear the pissy whingeing from the other side, way back in September and October of 2004, that Iglesias wasn’t doing his job and going after all those [nonexistent] fraudulent Democrats - or after Richardson, or after Dem AG Patricia Madrid, or Dem SoS Rebecca Vigil-Giron, or, or . . . you get the idea.

So, in the posts to follow, here’s the real story underlying the attempt to get rid of Iglesias.

Okay, since we don’t get C-SPAN 3 in this godforsaken place, I’ve been obsessively hitting "refresh" over at TPM all day and waiting on pins and needles for 6PM to arrive so that I could watch the rebroadcast of Kyle Sampson’s grilling on C-SPAN 1.

For weeks, I’ve been working on a post on what’s really behind the prosecutor purge, but health and work issues have kept me from finishing it to my satisfaction.  Part of the problem is that it has grown to such a length that it has to be split into separate posts.  I’ll be doing that tonight.

Josh Marshall and Paul Kiel over at TPM have been doing an incredible job of covering the whole mess, and of unraveling what’s behind it.  They’re mostly there:  A few days ago, Josh finally snapped to the fact that it was not in fact Carol Lam’s investigation of Cunningham, Lewis, Foggo, Wilkes, et al. that drove the purge - Lam was more a case of serendipitous timing - but rather, the so-called "voter fraud" issue that underlies the whole sordid thing.  He’s not quite there yet on the whole story, but he’s got a lot of it.

Obviously, I can’t speak from personal experience with regard to what occurred in Washington, Florida, South Dakota, and other states.  However, I was at ground zero for this effort in New Mexico during the 2004 election, and I can provide some first-hand background that is, I’m positive, representative of what went on in other states.  Throughout the course of this evening, I’ll be throwing up discrete posts on various players and issues.  I may not get through it all tonight, but by tomorrow morning, you should have a good picture of what happened here three years ago, and how a good soldier like David Iglesias has become the latest victim of administration swiftboating.

Stay tuned . . . .

And BTW:  I know Sessions is an administration pimp, but does Specter have to fellate them quite so obviously?

The original pearl-clutcher herself

You know, it’s 2007.  I keep thinking that, this far into the 21st century, I shouldn’t need to defend the fact that women aren’t chattel.

And then this bitch comes along and opens her yap again, and reality hits like an Acme anvil on Wile E.’s head.

Old Phyllis is clutching her pearls and twisting her knickers over the fact that Democrats have reintroduced the Equal Rights Amendment, this time under the title "Women’s Equality Amendment."  We narrowly lost it in 1982; it’s inconceivable to me that, a full quarter of a century later, we still don’t have it.  But "women" (and I use that term loosely) like Schlafly are why.

Her commentary on its reintroduction?  "It’s very retro."

Retro. 

That’s rich, coming from someone who yesterday (yesterday!) blithely announced that married women cannot be raped by their husbands.

Yes, you read that right:  According to Schlafly, saying "I do" is explicit consent to sex, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances.  "No" doesn’t come into it.  Here’s the direct quote:

"By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape."

Sweet jumping Jebus on a mattress. This bitch wouldn’t recognize rape if it walked up and shoved itself up her snatch.

Here’s that picture I promised.  It’s a thumb; click to see the larger view.

Now, is that stunning or what?

Okay, aside from the unfortunate hed ("Bill Richardson Seeks Clinton Scraps"), the latest NYO also has a halfway-decent piece on Bill.  I give it only a "halfway-decent" because, in addition to that stupid phrasing, it also includes a bit of the MSM focus on how far he supposedly lags behind Clinton and Obama.

On the other hand, reporter Jason horowitz has actually done a good job of packing the piece with résumé snippets and campaign anecdotes that demonstrate Richardson’s qualifications.  The third graf notes Richardson’s whirlwind appearance schedule on his trip this week to New York City:

The stocky, voluble governor of New Mexico had just finished a grueling day of stump speeches and political pitches to donors in six separate private fund-raisers around town. He capped that off with a speech, and then an hour-long question-and-answer session in a packed West Side bar full of young Democratic professionals. The next day, he had six more fund-raisers. On Wednesday, he was booked to appear on The Daily Show.

Ah, yes, The Daily Show.  The Daily Show, which I couldn’t watch tonight, because I’m stuck in fundyrepublicanville tonight, and absent a sat dish, no John Stewart, no Stephen Colbert.  No, the local cable company doesn’t make it a part of the cable package - unless, that is, you want to pay the premium rates that approach $100/month.  I don’t know about you, but there are many vastly more important things on which I could drop that hundred bucks a month than frigging television.  But I digress . . . .

Back to Horowitz’s coverage of Bill:  Grafs four, five, and six are devoted to Richardson’s experience and expertise.  One thing about Bill - he’s got a healthy ego, which he’s gonna need to overcome the MSM’s chosen narrative.  Fortunately, he ain’t shy about flogging his cred:

Mr. Richardson, whose long and impressive résumé in government and foreign affairs has earned him enough attention to gain him thinking-man’s-dark-horse status in the crowded field of Democratic nominees, is working hard to break into the elite club of front-runners, which includes Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.

 

He served 15 years in Congress before acting as Energy Secretary in the Clinton administration and turning in a generally admired stint as U.N. ambassador. He is the first major Hispanic Presidential candidate, and his two terms as governor of traditionally Republican New Mexico are another asset—especially because, as he informed the young crowd sipping pints of ale Monday night, “We elect governors in this country.”

 

At the crammed event organized by Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century, a group of politically active professionals, Mr. Richardson reminded his audience several times that, as a foreign-policy envoy in Iraq and the Sudan, and as a governor, he had participated in the major events of the day while his rivals were onlookers, busy obsessing about the nuances of their Senate votes on Iraq. “A lot of candidates talk about voting a certain way, and ‘This is my position,’” he said. “I’ve done it. I’ve brought countries together.”

"The thinking man’s dark horse."  I like it, except for the obvious - um, Jason?  More than half of all voters are women.  And plenty of us are ‘thinking women" - women who intend to vote for Richardson precisely because we vote with our brains.

And thank God for Larry Sabato (now there’s a phrase that, a couple of years ago, I never thought I’d write).  He flogs Bill’s credentials, too:

“You look at those four”—Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Richardson—“and it’s almost embarrassing, because he is clearly the most qualified to be President,” said Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. “It has got to bother him that people with far less experience seem to be dominating the landscape. Richardson hasn’t made an impression on people.”

Except, of course, for that last line.  Sweet jumping Jeebus, people, could we remember that the election is twenty months away?!  But he’s right - it is embarrassing.  And I guarantee you that it bothers Bill, but ego notwithstanding, he’s also a very shrewd and seasoned pol.  He’s not going to let his game face slip this early, and certainly not over the issue of fundraising.  Why?  because the MSM are all wet when it comes to thise:

Mr. Richardson’s most pressing task, for now, is to post a respectable enough March 31 financial filing to keep things looking at least plausible.

Bullshit.  First of all, this March 31 (2007, mind you) is an utterly arbitrary deadline created by a lethal combo of the MSM, the Beltway elite, and their own personal frontrunner creations.  Second, Bill has no problem raising money.  In the 2006 gubernatorial race, he pulled in more than 70% of the vote.  His opponent (John Dendahl, about whom I’ll have more later) ran such a shitty campaign that Richardson really didn’t even need to lift a finger.  And yet he raked in the campaign contributions hand over a fist:  In a race that could hardly be called contested, in a small-population state known for campaigns on the cheap, Bill raised just shy of $14 million - for a campaign that could’ve been run for under $1 mil.  Yeah, he’s up against the Clinton Money Machine.  But a few months down the road, people are going to be very surprised at their relative stats.

The whole piece is interesting, but I really like one of the closing grafs:

On Monday night, as the wait staff of Zanzibar looked on in tight black clothes from behind a fluorescent-lit bar, Mr. Richardson stood on the stage and somewhat deliberately offered meaty policy answers to questions ranging from health care, taxes and civil unions to the war in Iraq and relations with Iran and North Korea.

And the hell of it is, alone among the candidates, he’s got hard experience in every single one of those areas.  Those who are ready to write him off now need to sit on their hands for a couple of months.  If there’s any justice to the universe at all, the Democratic primary landscape will change drastically over the months to come - and the Richardson campaign will be one of its most prominent new landmarks.

Hack Extraordinaire Rick Stengel 

Okay, so much has been made in the blogosphere today of Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel’s essential hackery.  On the off-chance that you missed it, the nutshell version is this:  Stengel went on tweety’s show and regurgitated the MSM-Pelosi/Emanuel-BeltwayElite line that Dems should shut up.  To wit:

I think it’s unfortunate and perhaps short-sighted for Democrats to be perceived as focusing on the past rather than the future. If people see the Democrats as obsessively concerned with settling scores, that’s not good for the Democrats or the country.

Which, of course, is precisely the opposite of what Democrats should be doing. Which is where my hero comes in:  "If D.C. Pundits Say ‘Stop,’ Go."

I love Joe Conason.  When I lived in New York, I read him religiously; I was overjoyed when Salon showed enough foresight to pick up his column.  He’s a down-to-earth kind of guy, one who (unlike the endless parade of concern troll hacks Stengel employs; yeah, JokeLine, I’m lookin’ at you) has never been threatened by the blogosphere.  In fact, Joe was an early supporter:  About four years ago, liberal bloggers set aside a day to piss off bigoted wingnut Michael Savage, who was trying to shut down a blog that had had the temerity to make him look bad by, um, quoting him directly.  Joe even got in on the act, writing about our campaign.  I shot him an e-mail to thank him for plugging our collective efforts (no, he didn’t plug my blog or anything), because I thought it was important to let a "real" journalist know that his recognition was appreciated.  And he replied.  Not a big deal in the scheme of things, but when most of the media spend their time wailing about the "vitriol" of the liberal blogosphere, it’s nice to know that some reporters are willing to recognize bloggers’ efforts, and even to respond to the e-mail of a lowly and unknown blogger.

Anyway, Joe makes short work of the notion that anyone should heed the advice of the Beltway pundit class about anything.  Here’s his lede:

Someday the Democrats may learn an important lesson about the collective wisdom of the media in the nation’s capital: On important questions of policy and politics, the Washington press corps is almost always wrong. They are always full of opinions about everything from clothing, haircuts and marital problems to political tactics, but the safest course is always to ignore their advice.

Yeah, baby!  But wait - there’s more: 

But Joe’s not done yet; he takes on Broder and Harwood and Nagourney, too.  And I laughed out loud at his description of Broder:  "the ‘dean’ of the Washington press corps, whose magnificently consistent wrongness dates back to the Nixon era."  And yes, the quotes around "dean" are Joe’s own.

In fact, he slams the whole Beltway press corps for their hacktacular insistence on ignoring the real story here - i.e., the illegitimate purging of prosecutors and other corrupt behavior.  He concludes:

The Washington press corps is just as remote from American views and values as when it was howling for President Clinton’s head. By now, the Democrats should know that when these soothsayers warn against your present course, it is best to keep going straight ahead. And when they complain that you’re barking up the wrong tree, it is time to bark louder.

Go read the whole thing.  And then send Joe a thank-you. 

You know how your mother always told you if you keep making that face, it’ll get stuck that way?

Or maybe I mean "Misses?"

Today’s New York Observer has a piece comparing and contrasting Evil Incarnate’s pronouncements during the course of TWAT ("The War Against Terra," and y!mctp!).  among the highlights lowlights:

“It comes from the most sensitive sources and methods that we have as a government. It’s the family jewels.”—May 19, 2002, explaining why the Aug. 6, 2001, Daily Presidential Brief, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” should not be made public.

 

 “There wasn’t anything really new in it. It was one more sort of rehash, if you will, of the material that was out there.”

—May 19, 2002, same interview.

You know, sorta like Bush not being "truly [] not that concerned about" where Osama bin Forgotten might be in 2002. 

Then there’s this:

“The press, with all due respect, [is] oftentimes lazy, oftentimes simply reports what somebody else in the press said without doing their homework.”—June 17, 2004, explaining why reporters didn’t write articles supporting claims of a relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda..

Um, you almost had it there, Dick.  Your description of the MSM is dead-on (okay, maybe a poor choice of words for the guy who shot his hunting buddy in the face and then went and had a drink, but whatever).  Only problem is, you got the wrong dynamic:  Our MSM are at the stenographic best when they’re transcribing your talking points. 

Or maybe this:

“I don’t think there was a serious misjudgment here.”—Sept. 14, 2003, denying any underestimation of the number of troops required to secure Iraq.

Hence the need for the "surge," right, Dick?

Or this:

“Once we have victory in Baghdad, all the critics will look like fools.”  —Summer 2002, to a senior British official. 

Ed. note: Can’t you just hear the canned diabolical laughter at the end of that statement?  "They’re fools!  Fools, I tell you!  BWAHAHAHAHA!!!"  Shee-it.

How about:

“What The New York Times did today was outrageous.”—June 14, 2004, attacking the newspaper’s “irresponsible … possibly malicious” report that the 9/11 Commission found no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Yeah, Dick.  Telling the truth is soooo malicious. 

And on into the realm of pure fantasy:

“[Saddam] also had an established relationship with Al Qaeda, providing training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons, gases, making conventional bombs.”—Oct. 10, 2003, citing information extracted from a captured Al Qaeda operative after torture.

Riiiiiiiight.  Two people who couldn’t have detested each other more, and they’re working together to create bombs to use on righteous Americans.  Red meat to the bedwetting crowd, but no resemblence to the truth:

“It’s clearly established in terms of training, provision of bomb-making experts, training of people with respect to chemical and biological warfare capabilities, that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Iraq for training and so forth.”—June 4, 2004, six months after a special C.I.A. assessment ordered by Cheney finds no truth to the charge, the tortured Al Qaeda operative recants his claims, and the C.I.A. withdraws 153 intelligence reports based on his information.

And:

“There was a relationship. It’s been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early 90’s …. There’s clearly been a relationship.”—June 17, 2004, two and a half years after the C.I.A. reports that there wasn’t.

Good ol’ Dick; he never lets a little thing like a fact get in the way of the story he wants.

“[Iraq is] the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”—September 14, 2003.

 

“We never said that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. We never said that. You can’t find any place where I said it.”—June 17, 2004.

Um, Dick?  That pretzel routine tends to be hard on a guy your age; not so great for the ticker, either. 

In the understatement of the decade:

“Well, you can’t anticipate everything.”—Feb. 7, 2006, accounting for the Bush administration’s failure to plan for the insurgency.

But I think this is my favorite, especially in light of what Scooter Libby and the prosecutor purge have demonstrated about this administration’s thuggish tactics:

“We will not hesitate to discredit you.” —Fall 2002, to UNMOVIC head Hans Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei, before the start of U.N. arms inspections. 

No shit.  But let’s close with Dick’s Philosophy of Life:

“Go fuck yourself.”

—June 24, 2004, to Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy

on the floor of the U.S. Senate. 

That’s our Dick.

[Ed. note:  The NYO’s compilation takes up five Web pages.  Your intrepid blogger here read them all.  Now I need to go take a shower.  And maybe bleach my eyeballs.]

The view from the living room couch where I spent a long weekend.

[Sigh . . . .]

After three days of much-needed R&R with a friend, it’s back to the salt mines. 

Yes, that really was the view from the couch, where I sat with my laptop, catching up on work.  This place is my haven - it always centers me in a way no place else does.  I can focus in a way that I can nowhere else, and I always get a tremendous amount of work accomplished there, all while my spirit rests and gets back into balance.  And every time I have to go back out into the world, I feel like I leave a little piece of my soul behind.

I suppose there are multiple reasons for its effect; at a quotidian level, it’s probably as simple as the altitude and the clarity of the air.  But this place renews body, mind, and spirit in a deeper way.  There’s a symbiotic relationship between any land and the person who lives on it:  Each absorbs the other’s spirit, giving and receiving in a way that marks both, whether for good or for ill.  This is one of those rare places, occupied by one of those rare people, that combine to create a truly magical world of their own.  And that, I suppose, is the key:  having a friend whose beauty of spirit imbues the entire environment, including my own soul.