The Real Reason for Presidential Primaries

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

Every four years, political writers, reporters, observers, pundits and prognosticators dust off their expense accounts and travel off to places they wouldn’t go for any other reason at any other time.

It’s the presidential nominating process. And for reporters it serves two purposes:  it lets them see how the quaint people live, and it gives them a chance to polish up their use of state nicknames.

State nicknames are used only by political reporters and the occasional sports writer.  The nicknames, like state flowers, birds, rocks, insects and weeds are the product of long hours of legislative debate by people specifically elected for their lack of imagination and creativity.

But because of an inane journalistic convention that says you can’t use the same word twice in the same paragraph, reporters are loath to write the name of the state in consecutive sentences.  Every political reporter carries a copy of “Ohrbach’s Official Listing of Arcane Facts” to use for just such occasions.

So far this year, we have the caucuses in The Corncob And Cows State and the primary in The Mirror Image of Vermont State.  Today voters are going to the polls in The Segregation State.  Next comes Florida, The Wishes It Was California State.

That’s followed by The Slot Machine And Hookers State, and then Maine, The May As Well Be Canada State. February 7 is the caucus in Colorado, The Would Have Been The Mountain State If West Virginia Didn’t Get First Choice State and Minnesota, the Nine Months Of Winter And Three Months of Bad Sledding State.  It’s also the date of the primary in Missouri, The I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours State.

Then there’s a little break until voters in Arizona, The Almost Uninhabitably Hot State and Michigan, the Ugly Football Helmet State go to the polls on February 28.  March starts with the caucus in Washington, The Not Enough Creativity To Come Up With An Original State Name Much Less A Nickname State.

And then Super Tuesday on March 6.  Only in America would the definitive presidential nominating contests be held on a day named after a football game.  There are three caucuses and seven primaries on March 6:

Alaska           The Gateway to Godforsaken Territory State

Georgia         The We Ain’t Gonna Have No Yankee Nickname State

Idaho            The Ought To Be Part of Montana State

Massachusetts The Consistently Misspelled State

North Dakota The Not Known For Anything State

Ohio             The We’re Really Sorry About Cleveland State

Oklahoma      The Nobody Would Have Ever Heard Of Us If It Hadn’t Been For The Grapes of Wrath And That Stupid Musical State

Tennessee     The Moonshine State

Vermont        The No We’re Not New Hampshire State

Virginia        The How Would You Feel If A Ham Was Named After You State

Then the reporters will have to go back home and submit their expenses so they can be ready to go to the convention and find out that despite what they said, all the candidates always loved the nominee all along.  Cue the balloons and confetti.

Cars, Cameras and Cupcakes

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that it is now almost impossible to (legally) use a cell phone in a car anywhere on the planet, yet cell phones began in cars?

The first cell phones were not Droids or iPhones.  They were not even Razrs or flip phones.  Cellular telephones were born, like the child of panicked prospective parents racing to the hospital in rush hour traffic, in cars.

My first cell phone was in my 1985 Audi 5000.  It was a great automobile.  The phone was bolted to the dashboard and the size of the average wall phone.  The works of the phone took up about a cubic foot of the trunk.  But the Audi had enough room in the trunk for a family of four, so I didn’t feel the sacrifice.

Cheryl has often said she married me because of my car and my shirts.

I wore a lot of Perry Ellis shirts then.  That was before we went to Bangkok and my mother-in-law took me to one of the 4,500 tailor shops on New Road.  There I was measured and re-measured and the fabrics I chose were cut into shirts and delivered to the hotel later that same night.  The man with the tape measure, who made every dress shirt I own, even now, is a Sikh named Mahatma Kote.

But that’s another story.

-0-

Hostess declares bankruptcy and everyone wants to make jokes about Twinkies.  They neglect the Ho-Ho, the Ding-Dong and the fact that Hostess was forty years ahead of the cupcake craze.  And they get no credit for Wonder bread – helping to build strong bodies twelve ways.  Twelve ways?  Seriously, after tall and wide, how many other ways are there?

-0-

And then Kodak.

Megapixels –
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!

I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don’t take my megapixels away.

Somehow, it’s just not the same..

In Just One Week

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

The week between Christmas and New Year is supposed to be slow in the news business.

Donald Trump left the Republican Party and changed his registration to unaffiliated, causing unaffiliated voters everywhere to reconsider their lack of commitment.

Rick Perry was asked about the proposed Keystone oil pipeline from Canada to Texas.  He’s in favor of it because “Every barrel of oil that goes south is one barrel of oil that we will not have to import from foreign countries.”  I’m not making this up.  You don’t have to make up stuff about Rick Perry.  He does it to himself. Maybe he knows something about Canada that the rest of us don’t, like that it’s really part of Montana?

Aren’t you going to miss Rick when he packs up and goes back to Texas?

Gary Johnson became the fourth candidate to officially leave the Republican Party presidential cavalcade (Not counting those who were courted but refused to run in the first place, including Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, John Thune and the aforementioned Trump) and became the Libertarian Party’s tenth candidate for president. In so doing, he went from obscure to invisible.

Rick Santorum is being talked about as a viable candidate.  Really.

Newt Gingrich, facing the prospect of finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses, continued his positive campaign by promising not to say anything negative about the people he considers incompetent ignoramuses who are challenging him for the nomination.

Gingrich proved unable to find 10,000 people in Virginia – the state where he lives – to sign a piece of paper saying he ought to be allowed to run for president.  Not that they would work for him, vote for him and even consider him, but just that he should be allowed to run if he wants.  Having failed to thus qualify for the primary ballot, Gingrich declared Virginia has a “failed system” because nothing is ever his fault. He then announced he would launch a vigorous write-in campaign, unaware that his home state does not allow write-in candidates in primaries.  If he didn’t know that as a resident or a presidential candidate, then as a self-described renowned historian he should have know Virginian has never in its history allowed write-ins in primaries.

Michele Bachmann’s Iowa campaign manager quit her campaign because, he said, she couldn’t win the nomination.  Later that day he joined Ron Paul’s campaign, presumably because he thinks Paul can win.  Bachmann claims the campaign manager told her he was given a large sum of money to defect.  What he really said was more along the lines of “you couldn’t pay me enough to vote for you.”

Mitt Romney campaigned at a corporate headquarters in Des Moines where he spoke mostly to the building because, as only he knows, corporations are people.

It appears likely either Romney or Ron Paul will finish first in the Iowa caucuses.  Either way, Romney wins.

Christmas Traditions

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

There are some Christmas traditions I don’t miss.

4)  Flocked Christmas Trees.         My Dad used to buy Norway pine trees covered with “flocking;” white snow-lik-appearing carcinogenic toxic asbestos laden flakes that were supposed to make the tree look like it had been out in the snow, I guess.  But it had “flock” in places it had never had snow; all over the trunk of the tree and every needle covered top and bottom to about pencil width.  Those pencils from first grade width.

We didn’t put lights on the flocked trees.  We put floodlights on the floor that shone up onto the tree.  And we had colored discs in front of the spotlights that rotated and changed colors.  Red and blue and orange and, curiously enough, green.  Yes, because of the floodlights, one fourth of the time our white tree was green.

3)  Fruitcake. Enough said.

2)  Snow.      OK, not truly a tradition, but if you grow up in Minnesota it’s a fact of life. And I hated it. Every flake, collectively and individually. 

    I’ve included it on this list because of the idiots who complain that “it’s just not Christmas without snow.”  Well, the temperature in Bethlehem on December 25 will range from 45 to 48 so it will be Christmas without snow out there in Christmas-land.  Deal with it.

Snow is worthless.  Nothing that you need to shovel out of the way serves a useful purpose.  It’s wet and cold and horrible.  Animals slow their breathing and heart rate almost to the point where they are dead just to avoid going out in the snow.  There will be those who say snow is “wonderful” because you can go skiing.  The only good thing about snow skiing is the fireplace and the brandy in a warmed snifter when you’re done.

You simply must go skiing?  Buy a boat.  You don’t need to wear nine more layers of clothes and be treated for frostbite.

1)    Lutfisk.  This will take a little explaining. No, this will take a lot of explaining.

Lutfisk is Swedish for “inedible glop.” It’s dried cod, soaked in lye and “seasoned” by any animal that happens by the bricks of fish stacked up on the sidewalk outside the grocery store.  In my hometown we bought our Christmas lutfisk I think somewhere around June and then soaked it in water to leech out the—shall we say “impurities”—so that we might be able to eat it without suffering dysentery and ameobic meningoencephalitis.

Since we were destined to have to have the stuff, we were fortunate to have Swedish neighbors with whom we shared Christmas Eve and who would buy and prepare the glop.  She soaked it in water and changed the water every fifteen minutes.  The leeched water was picked up daily by hazmat workers in orange suits who transported it in lead-lined vehicles to dump sites that would later show up on the EPA superfund cleanup list.

It was also fortunate our neighbors prepared the fish because, if we were going to have to have it, we certainly didn’t want it in the house any longer than possible.  The only thing worse than the lye-infested toxicity of the glop, was the smell.

You might be getting the idea by now that this is nasty shit.

Regardless every December 24, our Swedish neighbors would show up with a stoneware pot of lutfisk.  And every year without fail she would say how good the fish was this year.  It was nice and firm, she would say.

Lutfisk is firm in the way grape jelly is firm.

Come dinner time my father, my brother and our neighbors would scoop this “food” onto their plates and hope it wouldn’t slide off onto the floor.  They were so excited about it.  At least my father and the neighbors were.  Genuinely excited.  My brother I think was just trying to fit in and be “a good Swede.”

I figured there hadn’t been a good Swede since Alfred Nobel and fitting in has never been my strong suit, so Mom would make a steak or pork chops or something for me and her.  Mom was German and while Germans aren’t known for culinary delights either – which you would know if you had ever tried what they jokingly call potato salad – she had the good taste to know that lutfisk is not fit for human consumption.

Truth be told, if you can get by the smell and the consistency, lutfisk by itself doesn’t really have any taste.  Most of that has been leeched out and transported across state lines along with the lye and the rest.  The flavor, such as it is, comes from the half pound of melted butter and two cups of “cream sauce” that every diner has to pour over it to mask its smell and enable them to choke it down while pretending to enjoy it.

So lutfisk is a tradition I don’t miss.  It’s not only a horrible dish; it’s a heart attack on a plate, provided you can keep it from sliming off your plate.

Debate

~ Lee Swanson ~ 4 Comments

The Republican candidates debated in Sioux City Iowa tonight.  I was remembering about the first presidential debate I went to in Sioux City.  It was 1976 and the candidates that time were Democrats.

Henry “Scoop” Jackson

Fred Harris

Morris Udall

Jerry Brown

Jimmy Carter.  Carter came on stage and drawled out “I’m a farmer, a sailor, a nuclear physicist, a governor and I’m running for President.”

Yeah, right.

Whatever became of him?

The thing is, one of them was going to run against Gerald Ford, provided of course Ford survived the challenge from an actor.  And who couldn’t beat Gerald Ford?  He of the Nixon pardon.  He of the WIN button.  He of the swine flu vaccine – the cure for which there was no disease. Gerald Ford, who proved the country can get by without a president.

I left there thinking Mo Udall was the candidate to support.  After all, wasn’t it time we had a basketball player in the White House?  Who knew I was 32 years ahead of my time.

Newt Gingrich said tonight he thinks he can defeat Barack Obama in a series of seven, three hour debates.  And he may be right.  In three hours Gingrich will just be catching his breath.  He won’t yet have completed a thought.

The Night They Drove Old Herman Down

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

If only we had listened to The Band, none of this Herman Cain pizza-candidate-for-president would have happened.

http://youtu.be/-VShpcqd3zE

As Robbie Robertson would have us think this was the story:

Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train, ‘Til Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again. In the winter of ’65, We were hungry, just barely alive. By May the tenth, Richmond had fell, it’s a time I remember, oh so well, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, and the bells were ringing, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, and the people were singin’.  They went La,  La, La, La, La, La,     La, La, La, La, La, La,    La, La,

Back with my wife in Tennessee, When one day she called to me,  “Virgil, quick, come see, there goes Robert E. Lee!” Now I don’t mind choppin’ wood, and I don’t care if the money’s no good. Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest, But they should never have taken the very best.  Like my father before me, I will work the land,  Like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand. He was just eighteen, proud and brave, But a Yankee laid him in his grave, I swear by the mud below my feet, You can’t raise a Caine back up when he’s in defeat.

But here’s what we know today:  Sing along

Herman Cain is the name, and I rode on the campaign train ‘Til Ginger White came along, and tore up the tracks again. In the fall of eleven, we were debatin’ and stayin’ even. I went on CNN.  It’s a time I remember, oh so well.

The night they drove old Herman down, and all gals were lyin’ The night they drove old Herman down, and the people were singin’. They went Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine.

Back with my wife in Sandy Springs, and one day she called to me, “Herman, quick, come see, there’s another one on TV!” Now I don’t know about Uzbeka-beka-stan, and I don’t care about the also-rans. Ya take what you know and ya praise the lord, But they never should have taken Ginger’s word.

The night they drove old Herman down, and all gals were lyin’.  The night they drove old Herman down, and the people were singin’. They went Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine .

Like my father before me, I will work real hard, And like my mentors above me, I’ll have a radio show.  We were on our way to the top, dodgin’ Libya and harassment claims I swear by the mud below my feet, You can’t raise a Cain back up when he’s in defeat.

And that’s tonight’s lesson for Mitt and Newt and Ron and Rick and Michele and the other Rick and Jon and Andy and Fred and Jimmy and Tom and Buddy and Matt and Vern.

Sleep well America.  Another idiot has fallen by the wayside.  Only 13 more to go.

All I Know

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

As a kid, I was filled with misinformation.  Not just the normal kid misinformation like mud is good to jump in and dogs like to have their tails pulled.  I thought the signs pointing to “frontage road” were directing cars to a street named Frontage; like First Street, Washington Avenue and Frontage Road.  It wasn’t until I understood there had never been an explorer, developer or president named Frontage that I realized it was just the nondescript street leading to the strip mall.

When people said “no news is good news,” I thought it meant there was no such thing as good news.

For a long time, I thought Spago, Drano, Pepto and Bromo were the names of the least talented of the Marx Brothers.

Fortunately I lived next door to a kid who knew everything.  And this was before Google. I know he knew everything because I asked him.   In high school, he once (at least once that I heard) made an offhand reference to some totally obscure fact that no one else could possibly have known.  I looked up and asked, “Tom do you know everything?”

Without a moment’s hesitation he said “actually, I don’t know anything at all about hydraulic pumps.”  I figured he was just being modest, because as he explained what it was he didn’t know about hydraulic pumps it was clear that he didn’t know less than I didn’t know.  I didn’t…and still don’t…know enough about hydraulic pumps to know what I didn’t, and still don’t, know.

For that reason and others, I’ve always found it easier to quantify what I do know than what I don’t.  On our first date I told Cheryl there were only four things in the world I knew anything at all about.  I said I knew a little about television news, a fair amount about golf, a great deal about college basketball and absolutely everything about embalming.

That led to a long discussion about growing up as the son of a mortician, but she went out with me again anyway.

I’ve clung to that claim, though the order has changed now and then. For most of my adult life it was exactly reversed.  Now I don’t think I know much at all about any of those four topics.  I am far removed from the ins and outs of embalming, as it were, though I am closer to being embalmed than I ever have been.  (Not that I’ll learn anything from the experience).  I don’t follow college basketball well enough to get into a Final Four pool any more, even though every college team in the country now makes it into the tournament.  I’m playing golf whenever I can and follow the game somewhat, but it’s been a long time since I was able to name the player of the year for every year of the decade.

And television news? Well, despite spending thirty years working at it, I’m fairly out of touch with it now as a profession and don’t really even watch it very much.  I can expound upon how it used to be done, back when we did it well – or at least as well as it’s ever been done.

Perhaps most disturbing is that nothing has crept in to fill the cranial voids.  I just know less and less – stuck with dwindling levels of expertise on four subjects and an urge to read up on hydraulic pumps.

Dentist

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

I went to the dentist this morning and it struck me (though not literally) what an arcane experience that is.  Yes they can take x-rays without developing films and they can drill without filling your mouth with hoses, nozzles and vacuum tubes.

But this was just a cleaning and it is the least high tech thing that is done at a dentist’s office, with the possible exception of the three month old stack of magazines in the waiting room.

When the dental hygienist hygienes your dentistry she still scrapes away at your enamel with wires attached to a stick.  And I’m not sure why.  I don’t use a sharp piece of metal when I clean my teeth.  I do use a piece of string, which is another ridiculous ritual altogether.  And I have to admit I don’t really know what she’s doing.  All I can really see, after all, is what’s reflected in her glasses which means there’s a limit not only to what I can see but also to how much I care.  I hear the scraping and the occasional vacuuming but beyond that I neither know nor care what is going on.

There does come the moment when the hygienist’s assistant comes in to the cubicle and they turn a great deal of attention to my gums.  Now the sharp piece of wire is poked into my gums while the hygienist calls out numbers.  When she’s done, she asks if I know what that all means.  Since she does it twice a year and has for several years I’ve got a pretty good idea what it means.  But she asks anyway.  And I answer anyway.  I unfailingly answer “yes I do.  It means I’m twelve under par.”

She laughs, unfailing.  It’s part of the ritual.

I may be alone in this, but I don’t mind going to the dentist.  I’ve been going to this particular dentist, with a break of about six years when I moved out of town, for thirty years.  Unlike many of his patients, we haven’t talked much.  For one thing, my mouth is usually pried open and filled with his hands.  And truth be told, I don’t talk much to anyone.  Cheryl’s been going to my dentist for about six weeks and knows more about him and his entire staff than I have learned in thirty years.  There’s no real surprise in that.  Either.

Anyway, this whole dental teeth cleaning ritual thing mystifies me.  It seems primitive.  Maybe not primitive, but un-evolved perhaps.

We should be able to do better.  But at least we do what we do.  If we didn’t we’d be uncleansed, unsophisticated.  We’d be British.

Food

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

I am by actual count one of fourteen people in America who has never eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Never.  I like peanut butter sandwiches (creamy, not crunchy) and I like jelly sandwiches.  The two together just don’t seem right.  People have argued.  Told me how much I am missing.  But I’m resolute.  Not something I want to try.  And since I’ve come this far – this long – without trying one, I won’t start now.  Among other reasons, if I did, this column would be one paragraph shorter.  (Which would not necessarily be a bad thing, but not enough reason to change my taste in sandwiches).

I was in my mid-fifties before I had a tuna salad sandwich.  I wasn’t impressed.  Not that I oppose tuna.  It’s very good, especially raw or barely cooked. Fish is so much better when it is slightly undercooked.  Put it on a warm plate, give it to a slow waiter and have him walk through a hot kitchen.  My Dad hated tuna, so we never had it in the house.  In Minnesota, tuna was a gloppy concoction in a can generally called tuna fish.  And as that‘s all he knew of tuna I can’t say as I blame him.

By the way, why is it tuna fish?  Is there some redundancy necessity?  It’s not t-bone cow or ham pig.  And it’s not an aquatic vertebrate anomaly; it’s not salmon fish, even though in Minnesota salmon was also a gloppy concoction in a can.  It was generally served mixed with bread crumbs and baked in a pan as salmon loaf.

But beyond that, I’ll eat almost anything.  Yes, I gave up meat in 1985 largely as a cholesterol thing.  Or so I’ve always said.  If it was really about cholesterol I would have given up ice cream and chocolate too, and then shot myself.  Truth is I gave up meat, which is to say red meat, anything that once stood on four legs, because a girlfriend didn’t eat meat.  So I thought it would get me somewhere if I stopped too.  A year later, when she dumped me, I couldn’t digest meat and still can’t.  I’ll eat something with meat in it once in a while, and my stomach will do the talking for me for the next day and a half.  And it is a cholesterol thing, now.

So I haven’t ordered a burger, fries and coke since McDonald’s advertising campaign was about how clean their stores were.

Grab a bucket and mop

Scrub the bottom and top.

Tell me what does it mean

At McDonald’s it’s clean.

All right, so with those few exceptions – peanut butter/jelly and tuna salad sandwiches, beef, bacon, ham, pork, mutton, veal, lamb, goat, deer, moose, elk, horse, buffalo, dog, cat, llama, camel, elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, coyote, fox, wolf, tiger, lion, rat, mouse, chipmunk, squirrel, dingo and koala – I’ll eat anything.

Except grapefruit.  I like grapefruit a lot but it’s a cholesterol thing.  A cholesterol medication grapefruit reaction destroy your liver thing.

When I was in second grade our parents went on a vacation with the Blanchards and spent ten days in Florida.  They left my brother and me with our neighbor Bertha who moved in to take care of us.  Every morning she would cut a grapefruit in half and sprinkle it with liquid Sweet-10, a sugar substitute that I think advertised that one drop was equal to ten pounds of sugar.  So with a liberal drenching of Sweet-10 on our grapefruit it was gaggingly sweet.  We hated it.  Isn’t tart the whole point of grapefruit?

Not only that, but she didn’t use the curved serrated knife Mom used to carve around the rind and separate every section.  She just doused it with Sweet-10 and served it to us.  That left us to poke at it with a spoon and leave it a mangled, partially dissected sickeningly sweet mess.

As good boys, it never dawned on us to tell Bertha we didn’t like our grapefruit that way.  Instead our solution was to hide the Sweet-10.  But because I was in second grade and my brother in fifth, we hid it in the same cupboard where it was supposed to be.  Had we been older, or more cunning we would have put it in our parents’ dresser or in the garage.  But we put it in the back of the cupboard and every morning she found it and destroyed our grapefruit again.

It’s not eating unusual things that bothers me.  I like that. We didn’t have a lot of “unusual” food in Minnesota. Unless you count lutefisk.  That’s about as unusual as it gets. But by and large it was a pretty meat and potatoes place to grow up. I never saw an avocado or artichoke in Minnesota. Most of the year our fruits and vegetables came from a truck. If they were fresh when they got there, they had started their trip very, very green.  Most often they were in a can or frozen in a block of ice, which was okay because much of Minnesota was frozen in a block of ice.

So people went looking for flavor elsewhere.  I grew up among people who put sugar on tomatoes.  Tomatoes were to be eaten with salt and pepper.  Everyone knew that.  I’ll admit to salt on watermelon, but not sugar on tomatoes.  And most vegetables were better with a can of cream of mushroom soup poured over them.  That’s gourmet.

Rain

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

This is serious. You may not think so, sitting in your comfortable little cocoon wherever you are, but this is serious.  It’s raining in San Diego.  It is not supposed to rain in San Diego in November.

The television stations are forced to use last year’s StormWatch graphics.  And that’s not all.  The rain is causing traffic accidents.  It’s inconveniencing peoples’ lives.  It will be dripping on people who weren’t expecting it.

San Diego expects rain January and February.  A bit.  Not on weekends of course. But now and then.  Certainly not in November.  Why is this happening?  Who would do this?  There’s a time and place for rain, but in these economic times, this is not the time.  We need to balance the need for rain against the economic needs of society.

Rain washes dirt and trash downstream, until it finds its way to the ocean.  And it makes the water unfit for swimming for three days.  The entire weekend.  Not that most of us want to go in the water in November anyway.  We know it’s too cold.  But there are people here vacationing from places like Nebraska and Indiana and they long to sit on our beaches and frolic in our ocean water.  The rain and runoff (the Chamber of Commerce has taught us not to say pollution) prevent them from enjoying the bounty of our land and spending their hand-delivered stimulus money.  Not that the stimulus was a good idea, but once the money was available, they may as well take it.

We understand there’s a need for a little rain.  Rain should fall between three o’clock and five o’clock in the morning.  Some mornings.  Not all.  And not hard rain.  No thunder.  Not any rain loud enough to wake hard working Americans from their well-deserved sleep in their comfortable beds.  Socialists will say this early morning rain will harm the homeless and a few truckers making early deliveries, and let them complain.  We know that argument won’t really hold water, so to speak.  It will gain little sympathy.  And the overnight rain will screw with those annoying Occupy people and that’s as it should be.

Overnight rain will be enough to keep the grass green and the plants alive.  And that’s all we need.  When the sun rises in the east it should rise over a cloudless sky, beaming bright, beautiful, radiant, warm, carcinogenic sunlight.  That’s the sort of weather that creates jobs, promotes wholesome outdoor activity and keeps people happy.

No one smiles in the rain.

It’s raining and there are outdoor weddings planned.  Festivals, farmers’ markets, soccer games and golf. It’s Beer Week in San Diego.  Craft brewers from all over the country are here to pour beer. Beer gardens, beer tents, beer events – most of them planned outdoors, because this is, after all, San Diego — and now it is all sabotaged by rain.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars of hotel and restaurant revenue lost to the rain.  It’s big business. Waiters and waitresses idled, jobs lost, temporary workers turned away.  Too much rain.  It’s costing us jobs.  In this economy we cannot have rain.  It’s just that simple. This is unconscionable.

Fucking Democrats.