Obama lite sidebar; the Candy is Dandy guy

The snippit  in the previous post is from Nash's "Kindly Unhitch That Star, Buddy." It's funny in a laid-back 19 30s/40s sort of way. Like a lot of other Nash stuff, it extends some Mencken ideas in rhyme and meter so atrocious you will at least giggle.

In a sense, Nash the poet (or scribbler of doggeral to academic anals who don't like him) parodies poetry.

Obama lite

Yes, that's a confusing headline. Obviously it refers to someone other than Obama who, himself, has set a liteness record which ought to send all competitors scurrying.

I speak here of  "lite "only in the mental and moral senses. The president's ambition is heavy beyond belief. That is, he wishes to continue being president. Outsized ambition is depressingly common. As the great sociologist Ogden Nash reported, everybody wants to be a wow.

...all the little process-servers hope to  

    grow up into great big bailiffim and sheriffim.

One lite competitor who won't scurry is Mitt Romney, subject of a short and cogent item in the Washington Examiner.


Writer Douglas MacKinnon offers samples of Romney policiy differing from Obama policy in ways detectable only by advanced science using the most sensitive instruments. If at all.

And then he wonders:

Are you kidding me?  Is anyone in the GOP paying attention to what is going on here?  Is the Republican establishment so desperate to hold on to its power that it will continually look the other way as a chameleon-like candidate not only dreams up the ideas used by far-left Obama White House, but praises one of the people most reviled by the conservative movement?


The short answers to "Are you kidding me?" and "Is anyone in the GOP establishment paying attention...?"  are "no" and  "no."  They are also the long answers.
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Silence Citizen!

1 -- -- I probably wouldn't  like this woman. For one thing, I'm suspicious of people who write  dramatic "diaries" obviously meant for publication. Nevertheless:

2. -- I would hate existing in a nation where people like Amy do not exist or where, worse,  the thugs of The Power have succeeded  in cowing them into obedient silence and cheerful submission.

3. -- Assuming Amy reported accurately in her personal journal, she was detained, harassed, mistreated, and arrested ("disorderly conduct") for the crime of reciting The Fourth Amendment as the TSA in Albuquerque prepared  to backhand her groin.

Tam and Popehat (H/T to each) write cogent takes on the outrage. But one more angle, if you please:

By the time the following dialogue took place, airport cops had handcuffed the woman (before arresting her and without Mirandizing her) and taken her driving license and other possessions. Officer Friendly and his fellows were just going by the book.

Amy: "I wasn't under arrest. You had no right to take anything from me. What if you(r) book doesn't follow the Constitution, the highest law in the land?"

Cop:  "It's not that big a deal.* It's for everyone's safety. We don't want to take the risk. You don't have to fly you know. You give up your rights when you fly."** 

 A quick review: This woman did not refuse to submit to a privates-probe by  the on-duty federal groper. She did not propose to physically resist any part of intimate search by a stranger. All she did was recite the Constitutional basis for her opinion that -- while she might have to be felt up -- she damned sure didn't have to approve of it.


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* -- If the cop really believed that, we're in even more trouble than we thought because he didn't come up with the Constitutional analysis on his own. He was regurgitating settled policy as handed down by the Inner Party.  When O'Brien is authorized to distinguish between trivial rights and important ones,  the Constitution becomes a quaint relic of the world before Oceania.  


** -- So, as we walk along the street, we are citizens. But a mysterious occurrence takes over when we are aloft, making us, instead, subjects. Not by law, but by decree. See Inner Party, supra.










   

Not even Huey Long could have come up with this

Let's suppose I sell you a nice early Travis McGee paperback for two dollars. Then, within a month, I sell you another one for cash, real cash -- two singles,  40 nickels, whatever.

In Louisiana, that makes me a criminal.


“Anyone, other than a nonprofit entity, who buys, sells, trades in or otherwise acquires or disposes of junk or used or secondhand property more frequently than once per month from any other person, other than a nonprofit entity, shall be deemed as being in the business of a secondhand dealer.


“A secondhand dealer,” the law continues, “shall not enter into any cash transactions in payment for the purchase of junk or used or secondhand property.”


The idiots who enacted this aggressive tyranny are glorying in the notion that they have solved copper-theft problems.  If a few hundred mothers nabbed for selling their kids' outgrown toys and clothes are sent to jail, why, that's  just the price we pay for law and order here in the Land of the Free.

"You in charge of gettin' dem pitch forks, Rabidoux. Me'en Evangeline gonna make up da torches."


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It 's beyond merely obvious what this means for us loopholers. You find the two-dollar guard screw you need at the parts dealer's table. He, and you, are required to complete the transaction by check or money order or, perhaps, credit card.  Government must have its paper trail.

Who loves this, Baby?

Well, the BATFE-I-E-I-O, TSA, and the rest of the homeland security apparatchik of course. Restoring small-ring Mausers is an obvious terrorist threat.

But if it isn't giving the IRS ideas I'll kiss your arse in Preservation Hall and pay for the videographing.

(H/T my favorite member of the military/industrial complex.)