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.

Barack Obama: Man of Destiny

Here's part of his recent oral output in quest of a heroic place in history.*


"These kinds of interventions, these kinds of actions are always unpopular because they seem distant and removed," Obama said. "I'm not drawing an analogy to World War II, (Then why the Hell do you bring it up, Sir?) --

--other than to say, you know, when London was getting bombed, it was profoundly unpopular, both in Congress and around the country, to help the British."

Mr. President,  Lend Lease was lopsidedly approved by congress months and months before Pearl Harbor and after a Gallup poll showed a majority of 1941 Americans approved "help(ing) the British" so long as our aid did not drag us into their war.

Did you, you know,  like skip all your history classes to practice up on your organizing neighborhoods skills south of the Blackstone Hotel?

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*Apparently he's given up on Obamacare as his ticket to Mt. Rushmore.

One Syrian, One Vote; No Americans Need Apply

His Ineptness the president demands that your "representatives" vote their "conscience" no matter what you think.

(1)  The presidential argument is, therefore, that his cherished democracy must be abandoned in the United States in order to create it in Syria.

(2) Asking a congress critter to vote his conscience is like asking Diane Feinstein to vote her balls.

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Last Burro to Bombay

It's a point for our side,  wookie-suiters who keep harping about Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, even in the face of our war on terror or drugs or whatever else polls badly this week.

You'll all recall the federal "keep your sorry arse out of my sky"  edict creating the infamous no-fly list which you get on for good reasons, or silly ones, or none at all.

Washington said it violated no rights because if you wanted to get from Amarillo to Hong Kong you could always begin horseback and catch a clipper out of Frisco. Voila! Right protected. Your freedom of travel is preserved.

Comes now federal Judge Anna Brown who utters our favorite word to the bureaucracy: No. A burro does not equal a Boeing.

She said: "in light of the realities of our modern world," travelers "have a constitutionally-protected liberty interest in traveling internationally by air, which is affected by being placed on the no-fly list (and she) ... rejected the idea that "all modes of transportation must be foreclosed before an individual's due-process rights are triggered." 

It is an interim decision while she's learning more about the TSA appeal system for getting off the NFL.

H/T Author of the World's Greatest Travel Blog.