George Will and the Great Raisin Raid

Over four long years, Marv and Laura grew abut 500 tons of raisins out in California. By government reckoning, that's about $700,000 dollars worth. And that's how much the government wants . The Hornes object on grounds that they bought the land and the vines, planted, cultivated,  fertilized,watered, harvested and dried those little tasteies.

"Well, sure," says mommiedotguv, "but they didn't sell them right.  They violated a (trumpet fanfare here) Marketing Order!"

Enter George Will, an old Cold Warrior and  Buckley/Reaganite journalist. I find it odd that a guy can go months and months without seeing him cited or quoted in this libertarian corner of the internet.

It could be that most everyone considers him just too 20th Century to be worth reading anymore. It's more likely that the moderns and post-moderns find his words too hard. U no the ppl hu think lol & omg & wtf are adequate terms for any necessary exposition and all possible conditions of human emotion.

I mean, WTF!? George uses the word "recondite*" in this column about government stealing the Horne grapes.  More damning, he often expresses himself in the pre-tweet fashion, writing in complete sentences and paragraphs, each bearing some relationship to its predecessor.


His news peg for this weekend article was oral argument scheduled for the Supreme Court Wednesday. The Horne lawyers will try to persuade the justices that stealing the raisins is unconstitutional, no matter what Franklin Roosevelt  and his brain trust decided in 1937. Will thinks it is.

His larger point is more important.  The level of government meddling and theft and general pestering is huge. But since it is so recondite, hardly anyone understands it. So bad that you are being taxed in one way or another to maintain an official spearmint oil reserve. Not to mention "almonds, apricots, avocados, cherries, cranberries, dates, grapes, hazelnuts, kiwifruit, onions, pears, pistachios, plums, spearmint oil, walnuts and other stuff."

And if you tell me you were well aware that it is in the national interest to maintain an orderly market  in figs I'll call you a liar and add that your philosophy (a ) smells worse than a Syrian camel and   (b) is dangerous. This dangerous:

Government sprawl and meddlesomeness mock the idea that government is transparent. There are not enough cells in the human brain to enable Americans to know more than a wee fraction of what their government is up to. If they did know, they would know something useful — how much of what government does is a compound of the simply silly and the slightly sinister. The silly: Try to imagine the peril from which we are protected because the government maintains a spearmint oil reserve. The sinister: The government is bullying and stealing property to maintain programs that make Americans pay higher commodity prices than a free market would set.

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I need to thank Mr. Will for adding impetus to my campaign to be your president. It reminds me to articulate a vital  plank in my agricultural reform platform.

Anyone using the term "marketing order" without obvious snide intent will be taken out and shot.

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*It means abstruse.

The federal government has learned that Marshalltown, Iowa, is full of lazy, flabby kids, a crisis of deep national concern, so:

Last fall, the Marshalltown School District ... (landed a $1. 4 million DOE grant)  to focus on getting kids active. The district purchased 4,000 pedometers with the grant money and found many students weren’t reaching a recommended goal of 9,100 steps a day.

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Physical fitness in the 1950s:

Scene: The breakfast table.

Dad: Cut the grass this morning.

Jim: But I was going to hike down to Kalo with Richie and Ron. 

Dad: Cut the grass first.

So it was spoken. And done.

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Free pedometers for layabout kids? ? You have to sh*tting me.

The Youth Physical Fitness plank in my 2016 presidential campaign platform.:

"Cut the grass you lazy little creeps."

The Smokey Bear Gun Library ("adult" language)

It probably isn't as Mark Trail-twee as the Cabela's shrines, but the inventory came cheaper.

This guy in Wisconsin was a career game cop for the DNR. Over the years he busted hunters and took their guns, not because anyone had found them guilty of anything but because he accused them. This conforms to the letter of our tyrannical civil forfeiture laws, and Smokey would probably have endured to collect his pension except for one thing.

He kept them, if you believe the prosecutors. His excuse is that Wisconsin required him to have a home office, and that's where he stashed citizens' guns -- beginning in 2003, apparently.

I'm not going to take time to dig them out, but there are a number of TMR posts on the subject.  The general idea is that cops often have very nice gun collections assembled at astonishingly low costs.
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And even if this guy had turned them in to his boss cops, there's that annoying Constitutional mumbo jumbo:

"...nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
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It just so happens that I'm working on position statements for my 2016 presidential campaign and decided to focus on crap like this after reading about government agents' lust for free stuff.  The platform plank is brief and applies also to the more formal confiscations by regular cops, game cops,  the IRS and its 50 state affiliates, and God knows who else in our multi-million corps of bureaucrats with badges. To wit:

CIVIL FORFEITURE:  Fuck no. If you want to take a citizen's stuff, convict him of something first.

Bitch Bitch Bitch

It's been a little negative around here lately. No apologies, the provocation has been extensive, even without mentioning the thieving admirals and generals.  I even got to thinking I was wimping by saying only once that the shutdown revealed the puerile pettiness of Obama and all who wield power in the federal zoo.

But everyone needs a breather, so herein is one of the constructive solutions which will be the hallmark of my campaign to be your president.

My first legislative proposal from my Oval Office will be a resolution to repeal the 26th Amendment. With too few exceptions to mention, young citizens who have not reached their 21st birthday continue to confuse their procreative urges with ratiocination.

I expect the first tweet will hit the air within three seconds and moan "If'n I'm old enuf  to fite i Am old enuf to Vot."

I'm ready:

 "By golly Joe Bob that's a good point. Thank you, and as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, I hereby issue then following order: "No person under the age of 21 shall serve in United States armed forces."

It's a start.

Drive-by post, mentioning sex

Imagine two old lechers watching MIss Utah answer the queston. 

Lecher 1:  "Gee, wouldn't you like to  (be intimate with) her."

Lecher 2: "Not at the expense of having to converse with her."

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Early in my First Administration, No.2 will be appointed to high federal office.

A Monday Morning Mash

1. My friend John in ultra-urban Arizona spent hours looking for .22 Shorts for his friend who owns a Beretta Minx. This crap has been going on for a long time now -- long enough to get me questioning my usual iron resistance to goofy conspiracy theories.

2.I'll ask her to do something about the slightly frizzy hair, but Rep. Martha Blackburn of Tennessee will be offered a high position in my First Administration. This morning on the teevee she characterized the Gosnell murder/abortion case as 'horrible" rather than "horrific." This persuades me she might refrain from  using "impact" as a verb. In this language-murdering 21st Century, that qualifies anyone for cabinet-level office.

3.  Global warming, anyone? The Plains weather continues to suck. If this kind of weather hangs on for a few more weeks, we're only a middlin' Tambora eruption from a rerun of 1800-and-froze-to-death. If you look at your weather graphic on your telescreen, you'll see a splotch of white about the size of Europe splashed across the country from Oklahoma up to the western Great Lakes. That's real snow, cold and pearly white, reflecting heat back into space at a time when The Good Earth should be soaking up warmth for the 2013 growing season. We'll probably be okay, of course, but it never hurts to remind the climate politicians of how little it takes turn an 8,000-mile diameter rock into a pretty snowball.

4. Nothing else impacts on my mind this morning. So have a nice day if you can, otherwise endure.

Background checks

I cave in on the the subject, but you have to do it intelligently, that is, my way. The official Jim Teamer for President Campaign position on firearms sales will require documentation for all transactions. Each buyer will provide the seller with the following statement:

I certify that I am of legal age, not a felon, and not mentally ill. (Signature)

It is to be printed on business card stock which may contain no other information. Firearms sellers will be encouraged to retain them in a drawer for a little while.

Besides, Elaine Chou is cute

As my campaign for the presidency heats up, I wish to make one thing perfectly clear. I do  not hate Elaine Chou because she is racially a Chinese person.

For that matter, I don't hate her at all. If I did, however, it would be because she served a term as boss of the Labor Department without abolishing it as the  Teamer Administration pledges to do.

(This little brouhaha may be part of a vast right-wing media conspiracy because, as is well-known, the American left despises racist comments and hasn't uttered one since late March of 1964.)

Oh shut up

I thought Spiro Agnew had a point that night in Iowa when he blasted guys like Huntley and Brinkley and Cronkite for their "instant analyses" of presidential speeches.  (Full disclosure: I'd been drinking and wasn't even in the Des Moines hall where the veep ranted. I was at Joe's  in Iowa City, recuperating from a  day of reporting the public university industry's  plans to slip another inch into the body of taxpayers. So I had to watch Spiro on Joe's black and white teevee set.)

Spiro hated television news for the wrong reasons.  Because teevee hated his meal ticket, Nixon. Logic dictates that we should hate it is because it is a community of celebrity thespians posing as an information source.

This is never more apparent than on days of high political ceremony.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The American public will get a competing mix of rhetoric and imagery in President Barack Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday, a speech that offers a heavy dose on the economy even as it plays out against a visual backdrop dominated by the current national debate over guns.

Please note the phrases "rhetoric and imagery" and  "visual backdrop."

First lady Michelle Obama will sit with the parents of a Chicago teenager shot and killed just days after she performed at the president's inauguration. Twenty-two House members have invited people affected by gun violence...That confluence of message and symbolism illustrates where Obama is in his presidency following his re-election.

When presidential  speeches deal with large problems, they ought to be analyzed, both instantly and more reflectively.  That's one of the ways we keep ourselves from being flim-flammed. But how the Hell do you analyze the face of an aggrieved mother, one eye teared up with honest grief and the other shining in the glory of being on national television? With Michelle. Herself!

You don't analyze it of course. You just hope your image consultants are correct in predicting that it will persuade x per cent more of x demographic to  jump on your bandwagon.  Or that they're incorrect, if you happen to be on the other side.

The result is a cesspool dunking of logical thought processes -- of sober discussion of what's wrong and what might fix it at what cost. One other result among decent folk is revulsion at the exploitation of ordinary people -- the real and imagined victims -- paraded before the closeup lenses to stir emotion in advancement of a political agenda.

This little essay probably ought to be written tomorrow, after the Obama performance. It is not because the ravenous goat of teevee time-filling has already begun analyzing the president's undelivered monologue. Further, it has the complete lowdown on the rebuttals from Rubio and Paul. Analyses don't get much more instant than that, do they Spiro?


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As your candidate for president, I offer a partial solution. I shall decline to contribute to a great national psychodrama, the annual posture-fest posing as serious debate about  how America should administer its affairs.  At no time will I address the congress in the presence of television cameras. I will simply obey Article 2, Section 3, of the Constitution of the United States.

He (the president) shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient. 

He need not do it in a Barnum and Bailey extravaganza, in the Big Top. under the lights. He doesn't even have to do it in person. Or annually.

I will do it as often as necessary, in writing with annotated footnotes to verify or explain my factual allegations.  No pictures. None. Copies will be freely available to every citizen -- from crazed bag ladies on down to electronic news personalities and congresspersons.

I guess it is another way of  intoning my own "I have a Dreeeeeeem."  I dream of an America where citizens sit around the coffee tables with policy proposals in front of them, in large type black and white. They quietly read and think and react, "if...then..it follows."

Should they find then "then"  reasonable, they applaud and support me. Should they find it otherwise they deem me full of shit and vote for someone else.

It might help, but, of course, it might not. We should try it anyway, if only to spare ourselves the annual aesthetic embarrassment of nationally televised tears soaking through the first lady's bodice.

Obama speaks, so to speak

I used to think His Ineptness was only a little more inept than Bush. Wrong. He  is much worse.

I listened as carefully as I could this morning and can not credit this guy with a single syllogism. Not a damn one; not even a credible stab at one.

For the first time in history voters have chosen a man who speaks only in sound bites. We might as well have elected Rick Perry.

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Vote for me come 2016.  I promise to bullshit around with you only for purposes sof mutual entertainment.

It doesn't bother me much that fresh-hatched Senator Tammy Baldwin is gay, purportedly the first and only openly gay U.S. senator.

It is annoying, however, that she embraces the rhetorical style technically referred to as "flibbertigibbet."  She brings nonsense -- and, more important, noncommunication -- to an oratorical height we've missed ever since Teddy Kennedy went away.

"Revenue is hugely important, spending cuts are hugely important, but the way you approach spending cuts, we have to make sure that we don’t you know, cut off our nose despite our face, that we don't impede economic growth and prosperity for American families."

Well, first off, Tammy,  if you're actually intending to, you know, vote for one budget choice or another, it would really help us to know which of the two choices is hugelier.  If they are hugely equal, there's no point in choosing between them, is there?  So  you might as well go back to Madison to protest something and have a sit down strike or something, right?

Second, about our noses and faces. You will still be in the senate during my first administration and, unless you improve, be placed on the list of lawmakers who should be suspended until they have demonstrated competence in the use of idiom as it is practiced by native speakers of English.

Out in the West Texas Town of El Paso

I knew El Paso pretty well in my more youthful years, even though I did not fall in love there with a Mexican girl.* My West Texas memories are of hot, dry semi-desert, a fine place for hiking and casual shooting in a landscape so deserted that you barely worried about where your bullets fell to earth.

But a blizzard? I know it happens once in a while, but it's still disorienting. Blizzards happen in places like Iowa and South Dakota, not down in the Sombrero provinces.

Anyway, Texas authorities are asking folks to kinda avoid Interstate 10 in the area until they get things sorted out. Texas authorities, being what they are, seem to have asked nicely instead of issuing decrees and threats as do our Road Masters** up here in in the Ethanol regions. And Texas citizens, being what they are, think it over and come to a friendly conclusion. "Yep, Roy, I think them highway cops got it about right, so we'll wait a day or two and not go over there gettin' in their way."

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Yes, I rather like Texas and Texans.  Always have. Taken as a whole, they are no more full of shit than us Yankees, and their lies tend to be quite a little more entertaining than ours.

In fact, I'll shortly  announcing my appointment of a certain Texan to be secretary of defense in my first administration.  He'll be fine, although I'll have to remind him every once in a while that Texas is not permitted to conduct its own foreign policy.

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*Not with Ciudad Jaurez so close, but that's another post.

**Make up your own Buick pun.

My hat is in the ring

Haven't meant to seem standoffish lately. Forgive me. My decision-making process to run for president required long and prayerful consideration. So did my platform which begins with the carefully researched and elegantly worded

TMR ANTI-PISSAWAY PACT.

Plank 1:  No tax money for bike trails. Not one f--king cent. Savings: $85 million per year at the federal level and God knows how much more extorted by subordinate commissars.

Observation:  $85 million would pay for at least 850 professional armed security guards to protect our innocent children in the nation's schools. (N.B. -- If said guards are also required to protect guilty children, the added cost is to be a local responsibility.)

My campaign motto: There Is Some Shit We Can't Afford.