I wrote a letter and here it is.

Dear President Obama,

I am sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering if you feel my pain like  your secretary of state's husband used to do. So I thought I would write.

What's kind of hurting me this morning is that I need to buy some gasoline. Both of the F150s are way low, and the van I use most of the time is down to about a half or maybe a little lower.  Plus, it's time to fill the gas cans for the little John Deere, the Dixon mower, the trim mower, and the  weed whacker, and both chain saws. Near as I can figure it, that comes to about 80 gallons if I don't spill too much. In money that's maybe 280 dollars, give or take a little.

Now, Sir, I hope y'all understand that I'm not asking for a bailout  like General Motors and the banks or insurance companies and like that. I hear those fellows were really hurting.

It's just that a guy has to save up so much to pay that much for gas. It's like, you know, I did all the stuff the government and the banks and other guys who are experts in the telling us what to do told me to do. I mean I quit smoking and didn't buy a bigger boat and even sold off a couple-three of my guns and put all the money  plus some more away so there would be a little extra income for my future.  Now that I am in my future, it isn't working out so okey-dokey.

Y'see, out of that money I saved up  I put quite a little bit in the banks and the savings places and like that because they used to have a thing called "interest." It was sort of like them paying rent for using my money. Oh, it went up and down a little, sometimes about six bucks every year for every hundred I Ioaned them, sometimes only four or even three. But it was always something, you know.

But now they don't  hardly pay me or my friends anything at all, maybe about fifty cents every year for every hundred dollars, even if I sign a paper saying they can have it for a long time.

I still get along pretty good with the girls who work for my bankers, so I was okay with asking one of them the other afternoon if they were ever going to pay me more interest, or rent, on my money. One of them (Molly, who is really cute)  sort of grinned and said, "Not hardly.  Y'see, when ever we need more money now we just call up the government and they give us some for about free and, besides, if we don't want to  pay it back when we said we would, they are really nice about it."

Well, back to my gas, here, Mr.Obama. How this works out is it means that if I want to use the rent on money I saved up  to buy the gas I got to buy this week, I got to have about 55 thousand dollars in the bank. If I do the rent on that will pay for it and I could use my other checks then to buy groceries and give the kids a little present once in a while and pay my property taxes and car licenses and like that. And buy minnows when the crappies start biting pretty soon now.

It would work out okay except that I think I will  have to buy more gas again before I would get next year's rent on my money.

Now I don't know if you can do anything about this or not. Probably you are too busy advising Mr. Godhalfi and the generals in Egypt and so forth. But I hear you have a pal named Ben who is pretty much in charge of all the money in the country. I wonder if maybe you could take a second to ask Ben if he could fix things a little so that  while gas is so high  the banks can't have any more free money so maybe they would want to pay me a little more rent. Tim, too. Molly told me he helps Ben be in charge of the money.

Also I was going to tell you about how much money bacon costs,. Some other stuff at the Fareway store too and wonder why we re still giving all that money to farmers to grow funny gas and such,  but this  letter is pretty long already and, like I said, I know you are really busy with important things. So I'll just sign off for now.

Very truly yours,

Jim

Getting a lot of use out of Jane this week.

John of the GMA reports a Jane Russell Mountain in Sasebo Bay, another one of those things I should remember but don't. Anyway, here she is as background to USS Ozbourn, DD846 and another Gearing class destroyer tied to her port side. The picture could have been taken anytime from 50s through 1960/61 when the admirals frammed her. I mean the ship.

(Esoteric nautical knowledge you will never use:  Many of the Gearing class tin cans underwent FRAM --Fleet Rehabilitation and Maintainence -- in the early 60s. Mount 52 -- the  5"- 38 twin gun mount you see just forward of the bridge -- was replaced with anti-submarine rockets.  The powers also jacked around with the torpedo tubes and the 40mm mounts to make room for an ASW helicopter  near the stern.)

EDIT -- The image comes and goes. If you get the stupid blue question mark, try this.

Oh, That's Smart.

Let's torment the cornered hyena. Let's threaten to prosecute Gadhafi while he's still in control of a few hundred thousand automatic weapons aimed at his peasantry.


You guessed correctly. It's the United Nations operating through one of its kangaroos, the Internatonal Court of Justice, led by one Luis Moreno-Ocampo who, if you ask me, needs fewer names and more neurons.

Pourin' Orrin Down the Hatch

Think of the corny title as a distillation of my wishes for Senator Orrin (I am Holy!) Hatch next time he has to face the voters. I hereby relinquish all copyright claims to it, just in  case you'd like to  borrow it as a line in a pleasant little piece of doggerel.

For one long day I was forced to work with his guy, and I came away resolved to miss no opportunity to relieve myself of my opinion that he is a  hypocritical, self-important, vain, and less-than-bright example of the American legislative class.

Alas, other -- though not necessarily worse -- abominations have claimed my attention since that day during a Montana senatorial campaign when he blew into Billings, so  I have been lax in public denunciations of this theocratic throwback to the days of Mountain Meadows.

A relatively new blogger, Spike and Tinkerbelle, reminds me of my lapse, and I suggest you slip on over there for a nice dissection of Hatch's latest. He's become fiscally born again again to the extent of being chief sponsor of another balanced budget amendment to the U.S.Constitution.  The Hatch BBA is  (a) meaningless in any budgetary sense and (b) a Hatch stab at not being Bennetized next time the Beehive ballots carry his conceited name.

I may have suggested  here that I am not an admirer of Senator Hatch and that his reputation as one of the senate's Blue Ribbon Porkers of is well earned.

...for earmark Hatch has swiped a batch 
of your dough for the state of Utah...

(You can have that for your pome, too.)

The report includes a lot of Hatch's Obamaesque light-rail pipe dreams, but maybe his cutest heist (on page 4) is $4.75 million for  a Salt Lake City  transportation "Intermodal Facility." I suspect he means a train depot with a taxi stand.