Berry beer lovers unite

I suppose libertarian readers agree that the wrong side won the Whiskey Rebellion, and just maybe they'll suggest that a new one -- about  beer this time  -- would not be amiss.

It's that durn gummint shutdown, again. Bad enough that most of the "essential workers"  still on the job seem to be the ones carrying guns and given the power to haul your sorry hooligan butt off to jail for taking an unsupervised -- and therefore illegal -- walk in the woods.

But now they're screwing around with your constitutional right  to an on-demand growler of gooseberry ale touched by a dash of dandelion pollen and a smidgen of Gatorade. That is, "craft" beer hustlers are facing their own barricades. Because there's evidently only one employee left in the TTB, a surly sort whose job it is to tell reporters it's closed and slam down the receiver.

The TTB? I'd never been very aware of it either. Thanks to the shutdown I learn it is the special Treasury Department bureaucracy in charge of giving permission to make beer, including stupid beer marketed to gushing neo-hippies who think a handful of sugar-steeped nettle leaves might improve a pint of Harp.

You will have gathered that I am less than thrilled with berry beer and all other variations which might be devised by Rachael Ray, but I will defend to the death Brucie's right to brew it and your right to drink it, even when the TTB agents of Eric Holder and Barack Obama are taking a paid vacation and therefore can't issue permission slips.

The job of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau is detailed here, and you may be amused to learn your congress has given it the powers -- among many others -- to deny a boutique beer license if it doesn't like the label attached to the bottle.

If someone will endorse taking a Claymore to this tentacle of our squid government, I shall editorialize in favor.

Shutdown side bar -- Mrs. Obama is more equal that others

Not all .gov sites are dark.

Michelle's is up and running. It's a must read. Where else can you see her as sexy hip-hop stunner in one frame, then gushing about healthy federal chow (which the kids won't eat) in the next.

Shortest shutdown question yet:

If the government is closed, have we furloughed the Presidential Protection Detail of the U.S. Secret Service?

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Edit to add on Thursday evening:  With the fracas in the White House/Capitol corridor today, the comment above may seem ill-advised. This blog has no Memory Hole, so I'm letting it stand as the off-the-cuff mockery intended. I add only that the TMR has a long history of opposing unprovoked violence against politicians and people.  
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A coprolite by any other name...

The Affordable Health Care Act is to be preferred over Obamacare. Jimmy Kimmel proved it.

Would it be vulgar to observe that self-government doesn't work very well unless the governed take their heads out of their asses from time to time?

ETA: --   H/T to my man in the MSM

The Woody Hayes Memorial Armageddon Wagon

Remember the good old days when we were beginning to worry about  merely PARAmilitarizing big city cops by dressing them tactical and giving them assault rifles to rein in the kids with nickel bags and round up hard-working girls on the street corner?


Things have advanced.  Now, even the college division of the Barney Fife Drum and Bungle Corps can have a cute killer on its TOE. To be fair, though, the junior colleges will have to wait for their MRAPs . So far they seem reserved for NCAA Division1 "schools."  Ohio State for instance.

Reason reports the Buckeyes are being pretty cagey about  "why?" -- not to mention apparently lying through their teeth.

If they need a weapon of mass destruction (14 tons, 11 mpg, drivable only by a trained expert) to dissuade the kids from parking in the faculty lot, why don't they just say so?

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H/T my man in the military-industrial complex

Why did the chicken cross the ocean twice?

TMR has not mentioned Tom Vilsack for a long time. That's a shame even though he is easy to ignore if you don't care much about your money, your food, your automobile fuel, or the quality of politicians making the rules you must live by,

Tom is my Iowa compatriot, from Mt. Pleasant where he was a renowned agrarian. Nobody could grow a cherry tomato plant in a five-gallon bucket like he could. In between trips to the porch with a watering can, he found time to get elected mayor, then governor of the whole state. A few years later, after copiously fertilizing the first Obama campaign, he was elevated to the national stage where he settled in for a nice long gig as Secretary of Agriculture.

And where, lately, he's decided the USDA should approve a scheme to qualify  your Sunday grilled chicken breast for frequent flyer miles.   

It works this way:  Klem and Wanda of Phartenholler, Arkansas, raise a half-dozen Rhode Island Reds. Comes time, they kill them and put the carcasses on a boat bound for China. The diligent orientals "process"  the corpses and put them on an eastbound junk.  In due course, fair winds waft them back to America, to the meat case of  a Safeway near you.

(Hush, please. I am not making this up. Couldn't if I wanted to.)

Some reporters, among others, eventually stopped giggling long enough to question Secretary Vilsack's chicken safety geniuses. They wore out a word processor or two explaining that it's safe even though we all know a dead chicken on your counter top turns to foul purple mush in about the time it takes you to nuke the spuds and stir up a batch of Johnnie cake batter.  

Maybe so, what with modern freezing techniques made possible through our newly free energy which results from Tom's ethanol mandate.  But a guy still is agog at the economics, and this one is going to take a lot of convincing that there isn't a billion-buck subsidy or tax break hidden somewhere.

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As a matter of diligent research, your author turned to Google and began his search with "Chinese Chicken." This is what he found:

And then he sort of got sidetracked into old dragon movies. Maybe that's wong, but it happened.

Dear Secretary Kerry

Hi,

Just caught your speech about Syria. You're probably right that President Assad gassed a few  thousand of his fellow Syrians and it was horrible.

Sorry to say that after that part, you got a little gassy yourself. Part that I had the toughest time understanding is that Assad is the guy who did it but
you and your boss want to bomb somebody or something else. If you said who or what, I missed it.

I figure Bashir needs punishing, but it seems to me that since he gassed Syrians, Syrians ought to do the punishing. I listened to you say it was really our job (this was your gassy part I mentioned a sec ago), but I didn't hear anything more than about  Saddam Hussein's old Weapons of Mass Destruction that will be shot  at us pretty soon. You remember. Bush and those guys.

Seems to me if your boss reallly needs attention that bad, you might just go ahead and have somebody shoot Assad. Geez, with all the money we give you guys, how hard can it be to keep another Matt Helm on the payroll? Or maybe Nicolai Hel if you don't mind working with foreigners.

The CIA could pay a pretty handsome hit fee out of its petty cash drawer. 'course, you'd want to find a different bunch of guys to actually find Bashir.

And you'd have to make your staff write a speech for your boss full of plausible dunnowhodunnitability, but with a wink and a nudge everyone will know he's the hero. You too.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. Have a nice day.

Jim

Tattoo a warning on the little bastards?

An Iowan who is quite likely to be an eligible voter went to the doctor requesting a tapeworm removal. He (she?) bought it online and popped it down, hoping to get skinny. Perfect logic. The worm would eat the excess calories from the daily triple bacon burger with extra cheese, fries, and a large chocolate shake, for breakfast.

The healer called the official state doctor who tsk-tsked to the press that eating tapeworms is a sub-optimal idea and suggested that stricter regulation may be necessary.

“I’ve heard that say 150 years ago, the proverbial snake oil medicine people would go around and, indeed, sell tapeworms as a weight loss remedy back then,” she says. “Those were the days before there was any government regulation on these things.”

Couple of things:

--The doc misses the larger problem which could, and should, henceforth be known as tapeworm.gov.

--A supremely apt Internet gag hit my inbox a day or two ago: "I don't say we should kill all the stupid people. Just take all the warnings off all the labels and let the problem sort itself out."

Benghazi again, plus literary advice

A few news operations are keeping the murder-mystery alive, the one about four  dead Americans in Libya last September.

W'hoppen?

Our survivors on the ground cabled Washington about what they saw and experienced.  None mentioned righteous Islamist outrage over a goofy amateur video hardly anyone except Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton  had ever heard of.

Call those reports a set of "facts" reported to the White House, the Department of State, and an assortment of other Beltway centers for advanced white wash technology. (I use the term "facts" with caution but thoughtfully on grounds that they're closer to truth than the Rice performance on Sunday teevee.) Notice how quickly the facts turned into Suzie's odd video story which stood up for a day or two before even Chris Mathews found it untenable.

It all gets too complicated for mere day-by-day journalism, and it shouldn't be too long before the books appear. The first one to focus on the Obama/Clinton cover up should be titled: "When a Fact Hits a Whore House."

MegaThoughts

Oh my! So much going on in the world. It's more than a fellow can examine in detail, so he is impelled to take the easier path of pronouncing cosmic truths:

1. Stockholm and London are under attack by revolutionary forces. The lesson is that an advanced society does not benefit from providing free candy to lure in tribes not all that far from the Stone Age. Excluding the Irish, of course.

2 Of course we've all wondered, "Why does the Inner Party kill its citizens by remote control and use the tax authority of the state to browbeat and destroy those whose speech appears to be Crimethink?"  Why, because it can, and because it makes governing ever so much more convenient if every bipedal drone in the country knows it. And fears it.

Officer Friendly Gets Your Gun

Clive's Finest found out you don't  have to pay even a pittance at gun turn-ins. . A few zippitydoodahs get fuzzy just giving their weapons to the cops. For the children, I would guess.

This one netted 51 "weapons" if you count the BB guns and broken pellet rifles along with assemblies of rusted parts which weren't worth bringing home when new.

However, I imagine gleam in some acquisitive cops' eyes.

After determining if they were stolen, police will send the guns to the state crime lab for testing. Those weapons that are not found to be linked to a crime will be destroyed.

Uh huh. "Chief, I'll just take this here Ruger home and hang it up with the other guns I'm planning to destroy." 

The bunk-junk photos reveal a few that we'd all be pleased to own and possibly a classic or two. Give me some slack for working with lower resolution images, but I notice:

A possible Black Hawk with McGiverned trigger guard, splotchy but savable ... A decent Ruger Standard ... A probable Hi-Standard Sentinel ... another HI-Standard-like semi on the order of the HD ... and something that looks at least a little like the Savage experiment with pocket autos.

But never mind. Clive is a safer burb these days. The Only One's press release says so.

Topic of Crapicorn

Even a dedicated wookie can easily take his eye off the ball. It is simply too much fun to watch the details of the government in power getting a wedgie.

For instance, Miller -- the career "civil servant" who bossed Americans through his control of the IRS --  is sickly entertaining. He been questioned all morning by the House Ways and Means Committee. Two things stand out. His attack of Alzheimer's, and his sweat. The latter makes a person think of a Golden Gloves welterweight after eight rounds with Sonny Liston.  ('course, like the Arias legal team, Miller doesn't have much of a case to work with.)

Then there is the congressional committee in charge of Obama polishing. They continue to assert that the real outrage must be reserved for two interns sharing the smallest cubicle in the Cincinnati office of their Inner Party's finance branch.

Such details are vastly entertaining, but if I'm to deserve my fur I need to lift my eyes to the big idea. The crime rests on questions of huge tax-free money to influence a huge government.

Everyone from the Koch Brothers to the Farm Bureau to Acorn is willing to spend billions of dollars to buy political favor for one reason. One. The payoff is hundred of billions of dishonest dollars, money extorted from you and delivered into the hands of whatever lobby happens at the moment to be most successful.

If American people continue to vote for big bloat, they continue to vote for big crime. That's how government is.

Tax-targeting patriots, the short version

Any tax functionary has the power to destroy your life for reasons he or she may  keep secret.

At this point in American history, the death-by-tax-harassment penalty is primarily reserved for citizens exercising their First Amendment rights by uttering words unpleasant to politicians in power, that is, conservatives, "patriots", and those who question the purity of politicians' motives.

Four decades ago, the same horror was aimed at the reverse slope of prevailing orthodoxy, liberals, doves, and everyone else who believed the sitting president's mindset was well illustrated by his decision to dress his personal guards like Paraguay's admirals.

The current president, speaking Friday through a hapless mouthpiece named Jay,  explains that the tax agency is independent, above politics.  Therefore he, personally, like Nixon before him, is pure and worthy of your infinite trust.

Benghazi, the short version

Four Americans died, unprotected by the American government they served. The Central Intelligence Agency reported, somewhat accurately, the killers were organized Islamic terrorists executing a plan.

This posed problems for Barack Obama, running for president in 2012 and for Hillary Clinton, running for president in 2016. Therefore they ordered the reports soaked in lye, sudsed, and bleached white, all to the conclusion that Mr.Obama and Ms. Clinton were blameless and, in fact, strong leaders. And wise.

Now, eight months later, as lies are publicly aired. Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton have issued the new talking points: "Republicans are politicizing Benghazi."

Official announcement

The following have been called to the attention of your author who, as authorized by the High Committee of The Internet,  officially declares them boring.

--Chris Christie's lap band surgery. (For those of you without Wiki, Dr. Skilsaw cuts you open and fastens a radiator hose clamp around your upper gut system. It is supposed to make you eat less and look  more leanly presidential.)

--Lindsay Lohan, boobs and all, due to her continuing teevee interviews explaining that she really not all that much of a drug-addled nincompoop.

--The crisis of finding 12 square feet of disposal space for one of the amateur terrorists of Boston.

-- Mika Brzezinski, especially her book about the difficulty of being a bony Polish ice princess in a world of Twinkies and Ding Dongs.

-- Jodi Arias, boobs and all. (N.B.  This subject will be briefly removed from the ennui list if and when Miss Arias is found guilty and sentenced to death.  Discussion will be permitted on two narrow fronts.The first is whether any actual harm to society will be done if her existence is terminated. The second is the morality of ritualized death at the hands of the state.)

Indictment Blizzard Smacks Maryland; Women and Minorities Hardest Hit

Lots of hanky panky going on in a big Baltimore jail. Narco dealing, boffing the guards, and other things that could get a guy locked up.

Thirteen female corrections officers essentially handed over control of a Baltimore jail to gang leaders, prosecutors said. The officers were charged Tuesday in a federal racketeering indictment.

The perps already adjudged guilty of something-- without need of further indictment  -- seem to make up the other 12 accused.  They're reported to be stalwarts of something called the Black Guerrilla Family.

I suppose finding this on the hilarious side makes me insensitive to cultural differences, politically incorrect if you will. Still, there's a redeeming social purpose.

What is more firmly under control of a government than its prisons? If said government cannot even maintain order there, why are we to believe that it will do a better job when placed in charge of free men and women -- our medical care system, access to the means of self-defense, and dietary habits  (care for a Big Gulp?).

  

Pass it to know what's in it...

Remember about 36 hours ago, before the cloture vote, some of us were  missing and poaning about not being able to find an actual text of the bill to disarm everyone except criminals?

It turns out we had company in high places.

Mike Lee of Utah -- pretty much on our side -- brought up the minor detail. Frisco Feinstein said me too, but it seemed to bother her less.

Fat and fingernails

I begin -- weakly but necessarily  -- with two disclaimers.

The first part of this report is based wholly on a Fox News item, so a certain little journalistic two-step is required, to wit: I believe I have never before performed such a questionable act, and I pledge not to repeat the offense.

The second part is less immoral but still academically suspect. It is snippet of my personal life which happened prior to the invention of the internet. It can not be documented, hence is outside the realm of scholarly,  peer-reviewed history. In other words, you'll just have to trust me on this one, Sidney.

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Fox jumped on the story of a little  Massachusetts school kid whose parents received a letter from his school. The lad failed to study for his Body Mass Index test and was found officially obese which, manifestly, he is not.

The report explained that the local school blamed the silly fat letter on  mandate from Mass Bureau of Nutrition, Body Mass, Child Traumatizaton, and Parental Guilt. Both mother and son reacted calmly to the teevee questions, much more so than appropriate. While one rather objects to an elementary kid saying "bull shit,"  these are the times that try kids' souls, and I, at least, would have forgiven him  the vulgarity and applauded his concise expression of absolute truth.

The mother -- who mostly opined that the BMI was not a great metric for determining appropriate weight  --  should have said it, of course, like my very own sainted mother almost did long ago.

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The state sent around a public health nurse to examine all the tykes in the realm, including my fellow kindergarten matriculants at Carpenter school. I passed handily -- clean ears, no head lice, no unnatural suppurations of disgusting bodily fluids.

Except for my fingernails. Mom always trimmed them. (Even in those days the family consensus was that I was not to be trusted with dangerous instruments.) She clipped them in a curve following the natural line of the finger tips. The nurse was horrified. and entered a sharp remark on the take-home health form (cc: school files; state Bureau of Meddling files; and, for all I know, Harry S. Truman.) It said that responsible mothers trimmed nails straight across.

You must understand that my mom's reaction to utter nonsense was nearly always a resigned sigh. "Hell" was not in her vocabulary; "heck" and darn" were suspect. But this one got to her and I recall pretty well: "If she doesn't like the way I cut your fingernails she can just kiss my (pause) A-double-Ess." 

Well said, Mom.













  

Fire a cop; save a life

I've encountered the Iowa Highway Patrol twice in recent years. The first happened as I was on my way home from the  2011  GOP straw poll. Tired in the wee hours, I pulled into an interstate rest area for a nap. A young highway officer woke me with a flashlight tap on a window. He gave me time to collect my thoughts, explained he was responding to a 911 hangup, and wondered if I'd seen anything. "Nothing much, just a couple of stray dogs running around." We chatted a minute or two,  and he very politely left with, "Thank you for talking to me."

The next one was less pleasant. Flashing lights invited me to  stop and discuss my speed.  The veteran IHP cop claimed 70. I stood firm on 69, at most, and (accurately) blamed it on simple inattention, the Hedda Pass excuse. We arrived at a reasonable compromise. He wrote the ticket  for 6-10 over rather than the much more expensive 11-OMG over. I departed angry only with myself. The natty officer did what he gets paid to do, levy the speed tax to fatten the Iowa treasury.

The point here is my personal view that most highway patrol guys are not unpleasant people and, in fact, are among our most intelligent and professional Only Ones.

Until, that is, you take a look at their  collective behavior as expressed through their union as blared in the headline: Number of state troopers down nearly 100 since 2000. 


 "Iowa State Troopers Association president Darin Snedden (said). '…Our state needs to increase our trooper numbers by 87.' In 2000, there were 455 troopers on the state payroll. As of February 1st of this year, there were 363 state troopers on the job in Iowa. That’s 92 fewer troopers than there were 13 years ago.

The implication is that motoring Iowans are at greater risk in proportion fewer officers. He wants $13 million to hire about 90 more, but  here the Smokey Union butts up against the statistics:

In 2000 -- the base comparison year Mr.Snedden cites -- we had 455 speed cops and 445 traffic deaths.

In 2012 we had  363 cops and 362 fatal crashes.

Hence, using the sort of logic loved by our political class, the more cops, the the  more deaths. It's probably just a statistical quirk  that the ratio of police manpower reductions to reduced traffic deaths approaches 1:1.

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Of course my analysis is silly when applied to the issue at hand.   All sorts of things affect road deaths, and -- while I doubt it -- perhaps hiring a few more highway enforcers is a wise use of money.

But it does illustrate the mindset of the ruling political class -- "We can say any damned thing we want because the proles are too lazy and stupid to check the numbers. They think math is too hard."

Whinny whinny

I woke up with the darndest urge to buck somebody off and crap in the middle of the street.  In broad daylight, mind you.

it took a minute to clear my mind and remember that I supped on Swedish meatballs from IKEA.

Poor Trigger.




I conclude that the Swedes sequestered a bunch of krona, forcing the layoff of all their royal meat inspectors.

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