Rand Paul

1. Cut your hair, brush it down, and go easier on the Brylcreem.

2. Find and fire the certified idiots in your circle of advisers. I speak particularly of the guy who told you it would be okay to have your victory bash in a members-only country club.

3. Shut up until...

4. ... you have a better grasp of the power of the symbolic. You don't look into the red light lens and start staggering around on a simple -- if "gotcha" -- question about how you might have voted on a the public accommodations section of the 60s civil rights laws.

I and some fellow libertarian types understood your agonizingly strained guns-in-bars analogy, but a million Kentucky voters wondered what the holy Hell you were talking about.

Here is a principled answer to questions about how you might have voted on racial rights during the LBJ/MLK reign:

"I don't think anyone can honestly say how he might have voted on anything 45 years ago. He would have been a different person then, affected by a different upbringing, a different culture, a different understanding of how a society should organize itself,

"But I will say that ending racial discrimination in voting rights was a decision we should still cherish and which was something like a century overdue when it was signed.

"The public accommodations laws of the same era raised different questions about how far government may intrude into strictly private affairs of business men and women. But for nearly a half-century they have been settled law of our Union, and if anyone thinks I am going to go to Washington and try to re-segregate the lunch counters, that person doesn't know Rand Paul."

The general idea, Dr. Paul, is to get elected. You don't need to shed your principles. You do need to brush the stray wookie hairs from your collar.

Franklin had a point

They come around in flocks fairly often, but a solo appearance is unusual.

He's a handsome fellow, so I offer the picture even though it shows the world I am still shamefully behind in yard care

FEMA Speaks

Ask a simple question: "What is a flood plain?"

And get an answer wondrous in scope, from FEMA

"Our experience leads us to advise the public that everyone lives in a floodplain," said Louis Botta, federal coordinating officer for FEMA.

About three sentences later, FEMA says:

FEMA statistics show that homes in a floodplain are 26 times more likely to incur damage from a flood than from a fire during a 30-year mortgage.

Okay Louis, if "everyone" lives in a flood plain, to what are you comparing "homes in a floodplain?"

---

This is the sort of thing you run into when your Podunk city council unanimously passes an ordinance to apply for federal flood insurance, a FEMA operation.

Our local gentlemen didn't seem to have a very good sense of what they were voting for, so I thought it would be a kindness to point them to a fact or two. The most disheartening one is that bedding down with the Feds adds one more complete layer of building, zoning, and land-use laws to what ever such gobshitery has been dreamed up and enacted by the local authoritarians.

I may or may not persevere in the research. Reading stuff written in Washington makes my head ache and embeds in my butt a deep sense of fatigue.

Big Heroic Me and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

Yep, I put on my UDT gear, slipped the M3 grease gun into a plastic bag and hit that Vietnam beach like Errol Flynn jumping Joan Blondell. Man, you shudda seen me when I....

Oh. Wait a minute. I misspoke a little there. It was actually a beach north of San Diego and what I really had was scout knife and a fifth of Three Feathers in a brown paper bag. But, I mean, I wasn't lying at first. Honest. Just misspoke. By, like, accident, y'know.

----

Blumenthal, you damned liar. With any decency at all you would at least refrain from insulting our intelligence with this "I misspoke" crap. You lied your ass off to try to look like a USMC hero and you got caught. Would God I had the power to lock you in a room with a squad of Khe Sanh survivors.