Anheuser-Busch announced that the Clydesdales would not appear in Budweiser's holiday advertising campaign this year. The big horses have represented the big beer company since before December 5, 1933, the end of the disastrous social experiment called Prohibition that bequeathed organized crime to a thirsty nation where, as Will Rogers famously remarked, “the only way you could tell a Citizen from a Bootlegger is that the Bootlegger would be sober.”

The National Constitution Center blogged on the role of the Clydesdales: “Incoming President Franklin D. Roosevelt had the Volstead Act amended in April 1933 to allow people to have a beer, or two, while they waited for the 21st Amendment to be ratified. The first team of Budweiser Clydesdales was sent to the White House to give President Roosevelt a ceremonial case of beer.”

“If a state ever once goes dry it will stay,” the Cherokee cowboy predicted, “as there is enough Whiskey peddlers to keep it voted that way.” Congress, Rogers said, “voted dry and drinks wet.”

It’s ironic that the most prominent critic of Prohibition was the country’s most prominent Indian, but after all the bad things Rogers predicted came to pass, there’s no Prohibition left outside of Indian reservations.

When I told my cousin Ray Sixkiller about the Clydesdales getting sidelined, he hit me with another Rogersism: "A man that don't love a horse," Will Rogers wrote in 1924, "there is something the matter with him. If he has no sympathy for the man that does love horses then there is something worse the matter with him."

The New York Times caught on to what tribal people in Montana have been saying for years. Glacier National Park is losing glaciers at a rate that will leave none in 30 years, after melting from 150 to 25 in the last 100 years. One of many consequent changes in the ecosystem will be loss of wolverine habitat. “I think,” Cousin Ray suggested, “we should send the homeless wolverines to live with Sen. Inhofe.”

Climate change denial is for politicians; bankers can’t afford it.

Bloomberg News reported that Antonio Weiss, investment banker at Lazard, has been nominated Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance, a job that pays $167,000 a year. Weiss leaves a job that paid him $15.4 million in the past 23 months and Lazard has agreed to redeem his unvested income, which translates to about $16.2 million in stock and another $5 million in deferred pay. “Last time I was down at the lumber yard,” Cousin Ray noted, “revolving doors were a lot more expensive than other kinds.”

Lazard’s other public service, in addition to giving up Weiss, was a report on the cost of renewable energy to generate electricity.

Solar power at grid scale costs 5.6 cents per kilowatt-hour. If government subsidies end, that cost will rise to 7.2 cents.

Wind power at grid scale costs 1.4 cents per kwh. If government subsidies end, that cost will rise to 3.7 cents.

Coal is 6.6 cents not counting pollution costs.

Natural gas is 6.1 cents with pollution costs more tilted toward carbon dioxide than particulates.

Lazard did not figure the cost differential if fossil fuel subsidies were repealed. The three fossil fuel subsidies most expensive to the taxpayers are the depletion allowance, the allowance for expensing intangible drilling costs, and the application of the domestic manufacturing tax deduction to oil and gas. “Repeal,” Cousin Ray snorted, “ain’t gonna happen.”

Offering a clue why fossil fuel subsidies will not be repealed, The Texas Observer gave favorable notice to a book by Republican Bill King, who has probably committed political hari kari by picking the title, let alone writing it: Unapologetically Moderate: My Search for a Rational Center in American Politics. “He’ll have plenty of time to search,” Cousin Ray remarked, “because he’ll never work in politics again after talking like that.”

Even further off the political center, citizens of Wunsiedel, Germany pranked the neo-Nazis who demonstrate in memory of Rudolf Hess and in support of Adolf Hitler every year by contributing money for every kilometer walked to Rechts gegen Rechts, an organization dedicated to deprogramming young people caught up in the neo-Nazi movement. In the past, Wunsiedel pranked the swastika fans by giving away t-shirts that would, upon first washing, change from pro- to anti-Nazi messages.

The Associated Press reported that in Kenya, “mobs of men have attacked women wearing mini-skirts and any outfit they consider too revealing including tight-fitting or sleeveless clothes.” At least two women have been stripped naked by mobs of men. The men claimed authority from God, but it was the Christian version, not the Muslim one. Cousin Ray was puzzled. “They say the women are wearing too few clothes so they rip off what clothes the women are wearing and leave them naked in public? Say what?”