Do WHAT for the Emperor?

On this day 65 years ago Japanese grunts on a certain Pacific atoll began getting confirmation of the rumors that the most godawful hordes of primitive barbarians were about come and eat their lunch. It would turn out to be mostly our Marines against theirs. Ours were better.

We learned some lessons on Tarawa/Betio. Maybe the most important one was not to screw around with invasions across fringing reefs.

Nature in the raw

If, late at night, nose in a book, you get hungry and burn some popcorn by pushing the wrong microwave button, and if you toss the sorry mess into the front yard near the big window, why, then, the next morning a beautiful downy woodpecker may retrieve a large kernel and perch a brief moment on your window sill in what I assume to be a gesture of thanks.

Little b******d won't hang around long enough for a picture though.

Loopy Holes on Potomac

You're the President. You want to tighten your control over undesirable persons. One easy way to do it is to write a bill "for the kids." As a nation, we love kids, although for the life of me I can not figure out why.

In the issue at hand, His Obamaness persuaded his captive parliament to tax Holy Hell out of tobacco to fund his new "child health" programs. The One is especially anxious to control the undesirable element known as smokers, especially those with little money and less clout. So he kicked the tax on roll-your-own tobacco from $1.10 a pound to $24.75. Smokers and the tobacco barons called that bunch of bull durham, and the latter promptly relabeled it as pipe tobacco, taxed at $2.83 a pound.

My moral betters are outraged. "This is a direct challenge to the federal government," said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids."

No kidding. Matt? Thanks for sharing the good news.

It won't last, of course. Even as we speak, Obama's Washington word processors are full-bore bent on closing this loophole*. But at least private, tax-paying business has annoyed the masters again, and that's worth something.

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Disclaimer: Your humble scribe is a recovering two-pack-a-day smoker, clean for close to nine months. He has no special respect for the tobacco industry except in narrow cases when it faces official repression for its very existence.

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* A word too often misused and overused. In the statist mindset, any dollar in your private pocket reflects a tax loophole on one kind or another.

Quote of the Day

You can claim Libertarians are "batshit crazy," but it's still better than death-camp pragmatism.

It's from Roberta in her comments section as she continues to object to the notion that Constitutional guarantees should be contingent on a religious test.