Don't Laugh

Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair (1952)

I've seen The Egg and I (1947) and a couple other entries, but thought I should watch them all.  Formulaic.  Dated.  Stereotypical.  But At the Fair is a winner.  Why?  Because it'sabout "good."  And "nice."  Without giving too much away, Pa's plowhourse ends up leading the county fair sulky races and Ma makes it break stride, thus losing.  The whole town had bet on "Dixie" and if Pa had won the whole town would be broke.  These folks gave up a ton o' money to save the town, who then actualy APPRECIATED it!  Feel good.

So yes, it's now 722 out of 5400 on my list.  And deservedly so.

Fourth Largest U.S. Gunmaker Is Sold Out of Guns.

Louis Nettles notices the Obama-age irony: “While the Volt production line is shut down for lack of orders a gun company shuts down taking orders because production can’t keep up with demand.”

The last two legal challenges to Obama's over reach were granted by The Supremes 9-0.  Yet CNN thinks Obamacare will be upheld by --- get this --- 8-1!!!! 

These guys get PAID for this kind of analysis?  This gets a C in my Con Law class, at best.

that was a comedy tagline on a show from WLW radio.

I thought of that when I read the end of this story.

The Los Angeles Police Department has announced it will ignore state law requiring the impoundment of vehicles whose drivers don’t have licenses. The reason is that most of the lawbreakers are illegal aliens, and anything that inconveniences them is obviously unacceptable. Or, as the father of a man killed by an unlicensed driver put it, “It’s more important that people who are in the country illegally get to drive than it is that people who are here get to live.”

President Obama, once again proving the adage that when the entire media establishment agrees on something, they're always always wrong, tries to weasel-word his way around a Solyndra conversation.  From ABC.com:

The solar energy start-up Solyndra, which had been the poster child of Obama’s initiative, went bankrupt in 2011, putting 1,000 employees out of work. It had received more than $500 million in federal loan guarantees through a Recovery Act program. The loan process is now the subject of a congressional investigation.

“Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt,” Obama said. “But understand: This was not our program per se.”

He's the recently retired motivatig factor behind C-Span.  Here's why he'll be missed.  From an otherwise routine interview with Al Gore back in 2000:

GORE: I went through a change in my life when my son was almost killed a couple of years ago. It was a shattering experience for my family. He has had a miraculous recovery and we’re very blessed and very grateful to all the doctors and the nurses who — who — who helped to make it possible. But during the long weeks when my wife and I were in the hospital room with him, I began to really look at life a little bit differently and ask questions about what’s most important in life and, having already long since been deeply involved in this issue, I began to look at it differently also.

Instead of seeing it just as an outgrowth of the new scientific and technological salt on the Earth and the population explosion which is adding one China’s worth of people every 10 years now, I began to feel that the deeper causes are within our own lives as individuals. What gives us the notion that we are just isolated one from another with no responsibility to the future our children are going to live, no connection to the communities in — in which we live out our lives. And I began to explore, in a very personal way, what it is that leads to these false assumptions and how we can get on with the task of solving thi — this crisis and organizing a response that gives our children and grandchildren and generations to come an Earth that is not diminished and degraded by virtue of what we’re doing in our short lifetimes.

LAMB: How is your son?

That is simply brilliant.  This middle aged hack pol goes prattling on about how a sudden realization of human mortality forced him to reexamine his entire world view and deadpan Brian cuts to the quick to find out how the kid is.  The answer, thankfully, is that the Gores’ son is fine, which only makes their extravagant reaction to the accident even more frightening.   Suppose, God forbid, that Gore becomes President and something like this happens; you have to question whether a person who undergoes such a seachange in their personal philosophy at a moment of admitted stress but surely not of catastrophe is even fit to govern.

Watching The Adjustment Bureau with an eye towards using it in a future ethics class.  Not gonna happen.  But I was struck by Terance Stamp's characters revelation. 

We actually tried Free Will before. After taking you from hunting and gathering to the height of the Roman Empire we stepped back to see how you'd do on your own. You gave us the Dark Ages for five centuries... until finally we decided we should come back in. The Chairman thought maybe we just needed to do a better job of teaching you how to ride a bike before taking the training wheels off again. So we gave you the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution. For six hundred years we taught you to control your impulses with reason, then in 1910 we stepped back. Within fifty years, you'd brought us World War I, the Depression, Fascism, the Holocaust and capped it off by bringing the entire planet to the brink of destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that point a decision was taken to step back in again before you did something that even we couldn't fix. You don't have free will, David. You have the appearance of free will. 

We also elected Woodrow Wilson.  Wonder if the film makers were aware of how political and profound this statement is?

You can't win 'em all if you don't win the first one.

Ladies and Gents I give you Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC ... a big 9-0 win against the POTUS and  his Big Gubmint monstrosity.

Next up was Sackett v. EPA - and we got ANOTHER unanimous (9–0) opinion.

I really think Roberts has done a nice job here because IF PPACA goes down 5-4 the media will be filled with rancor against the "activist" Conservative judges when in reality it will be the left wing judges who will have departed from these two unanimous decisions.

"Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do"

Back in '94 the House barbershop was privatized.  The Senate barbershop is still subsidized.  The result?

Before it was turned into a private enterprise, the House shop employed 16 barbers, each of whom received federal pensions and benefits. Now the shop has three employees, one of which is part-time.

“We’ve gone through a lot of changes, with members going back to their districts on the weekends and fewer customers because of the extra security that the House has put up after 9/11, but we’re all self-employed,” long-time House barber Joe Quattrone says. “Money’s not everything. I love coming to work every day. Would you rather go to a job you hated for $50,000 or one you liked for $40,000?”

The House shop actually turned a profit last year, despite occupying an inferior location in the Rayburn House Office Building, farther from the two adjoining House buildings than is the Senate’s barbershop.

Meanwhile, the Senate Hair Care Services, the formal name for the Senate barbershop, with its 11 employees, required a $300,000 taxpayer bailout to keep its barber pole lighted, despite not having to pay the government a dime in rent.

Having the advantage of government subsidy, one might assume senators pay less for their haircuts and shaves than House members.  Not hardly.  While the Senate barbershop charges $23 for a trim with water but no shampoo and $20 for a shave, the House barbershop charges $17 and $10.

So while many lawmakers are all for having the government take over healthcare and other things that private enterprise can provide better and cheaper, the inefficiency of the Senate barbershop has at least one big government cheerleader wondering.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., is no fan of free markets, but says “I would like to know why the Senate barbershop is running its business into the red.”