WHO IS SAM AND WHY IS HE RATIONING RICE?

Here's another phony crisis created by bored newspeople. The headlines say that some place called Sam's Club is rationing rice in the United States. It turns out that Sam's Club is one of those giant wholesale grocery warehouses that sell 55 gallon drums of corn flakes and is owned by one of America's greatest enemies, Walmart, and named after the dead guy Sam Walton who founded the rapacious retail chain. Anyway, here's the "rationing" plan: 200 pounds per customer per visit. That's rationing? Presumably you could haul your 200 pounds of rice to your car and revisit the place for another 200 pounds and do this all day long if you like. It's just like any coupon sale in any supermarket, limit four to a customer, nothing out of the ordinary. What you're going to do with enough rice to feed a large town is another story, and probably one more interesting than the phony food rationing reports.

Now, I'm an American and I work in the food business. During any given year, I personally throw out more perfectly good food than would sustain any thirty or forty large people, their entire required intake to maintain them as fatsos, fancy desserts and all. I just dump it right in the trash. Am I being malicious? Wasteful? Callous? No, I'm dealing with the realities of the food and party business. I'm sure not going to put leftovers in my car and take them home. If there was somebody to give this good food to I'd be glad to let them back up their own vehicle and haul it away but except in rare cases, that just doesn't happen. So if anything, there's too much food in America. Why do we have so many well-fed rats in New York? Well, because we're feeding them a lot of tasty stuff that we have no use for.

As far as the politics of having so much food and other places not having enough, well, I don't know how to fix that, any more than I know how to fix the phony news business. You can't just throw out unnecessary news people like you can uneaten linguini, as tempting as that thought might be. Bill O'Really would look good in a dumpster. There's a guy who wakes up in the morning with phony news stories floating around his funny shaped head and there's nobody where he works who has the nerve to tell him he hasn't had a lucid or important thought in decades. And he's far from alone in the video news media when it cones to inventing a phony crisis. No shortage or rationing there.

Unless of course your idea of an important story is declaring American flag lapel pins a good barometer for gauging someone's patriotism. Nowhere is it mentioned that turning our national symbol into a trivial wardrobe accessory seems like a pretty cheesy and cynical idea. No,that aspect is overlooked. It's like the whole flag burning issue, where people got all hot and bothered about burning American flags to the point where some wanted a Constitutional Amendment banning this act. The only trouble there was that there is already an existing law mandating that the only legal way to dispose of a worn-out American flag is to, you guessed it, burn it. So there was a tempest in a teapot, no? The Supreme Court agreed and sent the fools packing.

And once again, no mention was ever made by these geniuses of the disgrace to our flag by flying it over a nation conquered for no reason at all except to steal their oil. Or the disgrace not to the symbol of America, but America itself, of having a presidential administration mounting unceasing attacks on the Bill of Rights. That's okay with these people. The same people who use the words "market adjustment" for recession, "down-sizing" for firing workers and "outsourcing" for selling American jobs overseas would now have you believe that limiting somebody to buying 200 pounds of rice is food rationing. I've got a lot of leftovers for these guys to eat before they start talking about famine in America. Come to the kitchen door and bring your appetite.