Here is a video of a bunch of Norwegian soldiers in Kosovo doing a takeoff on the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo”. It is well done and very funny. I figure these guys must have just finished off a couple bottles of mead sent in a care package from home.

Via the Dog Snot Guys

The Ruling

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that state regulatory schemes such as those in Michigan and New York, which permit in-state shipments of wine to consumers, but prohibit out-of-state wineries from making such direct shipments, violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The States argued that the Twenty-First Amendment’s (the one that repealed the Eighteenth Amendment – “Prohibition”) broad recognition of the States’ police powers in regulating alcoholic beverages permitted Michigan and New York’s differential treatment of in-state and out-of-state wineries with respect to permitting direct shipments to consumers.

The Court ruled that the Michigan and New York direct shipping laws unfairly discriminated against out-of-state businesses, and, as such, violated the Commerce Clause of the Constitution and that the discrimination was not authorized or permitted by the Twenty-First Amendment.

What does this mean for New Jersey?

New Jersey has a statutory and regulatory system similar to those in Michigan and New York (i.e. a three-tiered system requiring separate licenses for producers, wholesalers, and retailers). Also like Michigan and New York, New Jersey prohibits direct shipments of wine to New Jersey consumers from out-of-state wineries, but permits in-state wineries to ship directly to consumers. However, for a New Jersey winery to make direct shipments to consumers in New Jersey the winery must comply with Byzantine and burdensome regulations concerning the “transportation” of alcoholic beverages within the state.

Does this mean that today we in the Garden State can order wine on the internet directly from a California winery?

Hardly.

The New Jersey Attorney General will weigh in on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision, but ultimately it will be the state legislature that will have to sort it all out.

That means, of course, that it will likely boil down to a battle of the lobbyists. If the lobbyists representing the licensed distributors carry the day, the legislature can protect the distributors by banning the direct shipment of wine to consumers in New Jersey from anywhere, including in-state wineries. That would remove the discrimination against out-of-state wineries, thereby curing any Commerce Clause violation.

As a practical matter, this would not have much effect, if any, on the current operations of in-state wineries, because they appear not to be shipping wine, even to in-state consumers. I was unable to locate any New Jersey winery that currently ships directly to consumers in New Jersey. I suspect that this may be due to the onerous regulations concerning the transportation of alcoholic beverages within the state. It may be that the wineries don’t want to incur the bother and the expense of obtaining the necessary licenses and following the required procedures to ship wine to in-state consumers. Perhaps the regulatory burdens make it unprofitable for common carriers to deliver wine to consumers. I’m not sure which may be the case.

The other option open to legislators who wish to protect the distributors is to apply the existing Draconian transportation rules to out-of state wineries. Again, this would treat in-state and out-of-state wineries equally and would not violate the Commerce Clause. This may well have the same chilling effect on out-of-state wineries that it apparently has now in in-state wineries.

Either option would seem to be well within the State’s police powers under the Twenty-First Amendment to regulate the transportation of alcoholic beverages.

On the other hand, if the lobbyists representing in-state consumers and out-of-state wineries are more convincing, the ban will be lifted and the transportation rules will be relaxed so as to permit out of state wineries to easily ship wine directly to New Jersey consumers, as is the case in many other states.

Sadly, in The Jersey Political Swamp, the matter will probably be decided based upon which group of lobbyists can “buy” more legislators.

Here’s mud in your eye!

If somebody did to my hair what a crazed barber did to John Shabe’s, I’d have to kick his ass. I figure the guy who cut his hair must have been trained at Fort Dix.

It’ll grow back, John. But, in the meantime, consider a lid. 😉

Christina has some fine looking new digs. Make the necessary adjustments to bookmarks and blogrolls.

I finally found enough quiet time to read and thoroughly enjoy Kelley’s Chapter Four of the Blog Western. The lady can write up a storm. That’s for damned sure.

Next up, Eric.

I found this over at Accidental Verbosity, and I had a bit of fun thinking about some of the things I have never done. During the ride into work, I thought that there really should be two lists; one comprised of things I have never done, but would like to do, and the other comprised of things I have never done and have no intention of ever doing.

Then I got to thinking, ”Yo, Jimbo. Don’t overthink the farookin’ thing. Just write a list of ten things, fer Chrissakes.”

So, here they are:

I have never …:
1. Ridden in a tank
2. Used an ATM
3. Water skied.
4. Driven a tractor
5. Milked (or even touched) a cow
6. Watched a single episode of: Dallas, The Waltons, or Desperate Housewives
7. Been able to stay awake during the movie Gone With the Wind
8. Been arrested
9. Been transported anywhere in an ambulance (knock wood)
10. Gotten an Instalanche.

I was just talking to my buddy Paulie at the Post, and he showed me pictures of the ’67 GTO he has been refurbishing (I’m not sure that’s the right word) for years. He is re-doing the entire car from chassis up. The mondo-expensive paint job is now complete (candy apple red), and he had the bumpers chromed in some place in North Carolina. In a year or so it should be on the road, at least to car shows. It’s a beauty.

A friend of mine had a GTO in the sixties (I believe it was a ’66). I drove it a few times, and it was a killer.

With cars and car shows on my mind, I got a great kick out of this – a car cozy!

Via Cripes, Suzette.

Spent the better part of the morning at Costco (God help me) and the liquor store picking up soda, beer and stuff for the Post’s Memorial Day Open House that follows the Memorial Day parade in town. I wanted to get it done today, because next week at this time, a good number of the Usual Suspects will be in Florida doing a lot of poolside sitting and a helluva lot of poolside drinking. I’m psyched.

Now, I just have enough time to read a chapter or two in a real book before I head over to the Post for the usual Sunday gathering of the Usual Suspects.

I’ll be home in time to watch Deadwood.

Later.

Some people are “Keepers.” They find it very difficult to throw things away. By contrast, some people are “Tossers.” They believe that anything that hasn’t been looked at, touched, or smelled in a year can and should be tossed. Keepers, of course, inevitably run into a storage problem, which can only be managed by occasional tossing.

For Keepers, this is never an easy thing to do. I know; I tend to be a keeper, and I only toss things following an exchange of words that usually begins with something like, ”Do you really need this shit? You haven’t touched this shit in years? I mean REALLY!” For example, I only recently and (and mostreluctantly) tossed a bunch of my college textbooks, many of which, I hated to concede, were seriously out-of-date. There is just no getting around it. Pavlov and the conditioned reflex really is old news.

I have several large containers of record albums and 45s (the small records with the big hole in them), which have not seen a turntable in years and may well never see one again. The same goes for reel-to-reel tapes. They sit in a box in a basement awaiting that “some day” when I get my hands on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I still have all my books and notebooks from Law School, and, at this point, tossing them is non-negotiable. So far, I have managed to successfully protect my collection of beer coasters from Germany that have been sitting in a box for decades awaiting the “some day” when I have a bar in the house.

Still, the basement remains a bit of a cluttered mess. It’s the sad lot of Keepers.

However, the Keepers with the most serious problems are the “Accumulator-Keepers.” Unlike the run-of-the-mill Keepers who accumulate things in the normal course of living, the “Accumulator-Keepers” are aggressive acquirers of things. They are the Home Shopping Network, QVC, eBay, and flea market junkies, who simply cannot go a day without buying stuff – and lots of it.

The Accumulator-Keepers face gargantuan storage problems, which often result in clutter that works its way up from of the chock-filled basement and spills out from the jam-packed garage into the house.

TigerHawk linked to a series of photos of a house that belongs to a World Class Accumulator-Keeper. It may be the worst case of clutter I have ever seen. Now I know that you are thinking, “Yo, Jimbo, I’m surfing blogs here, and I really don’t think I need to take up limited blog-surfing time to look at a cluttered house. What’s the big deal? It’s only a house with a bit too much random stuff in it, right?.”

WRONG. Go look.

On Thursday, one of Imus in the Morning’s of late, typically liberal pukes guests was Jon Corzine.

My first reaction was to immediately change the station, as I do when Imus fawns over John Kerry or Paul Bagala.

However, having been an Imus listener for more than a couple decades (lately, I find myself wondering why), I returned to the Imus program to listen to what our Senator from New Jersey had to say.

After listening for a few minutes, my impression was that this guy had better never criticize the President for his lack of articulateness. In my view, what he had to say was pure garble, and socialist garble at that. I was, however, prepared to give his early morning radio word salad the benefit of the doubt, traceable to my disapproval of his performance as a Senator and my desire that he never become the governor of this state.

I now see that Mr. Corzine has decided to dip his toe into the Blogosphere as a featured guest poster on Ms. Huffington’s “blog.” Enlighten New Jersey does a wonderful job ot politely showing that Mr. Corzine could use a grammar tutorial as well as a lesson on using Mister Spell Check before posting.

Enlighten New Jersey notes:

We never learn what Corzine’s going to Iraq had to do with figuring out how to prevent another attack, but he did discover American “soldiers are professionals in the most magnificant sense of the word..” (We couldn’t find “magnificant” in the dictionary, but we will assume Corzine was impressed with our soldiers.)

It saddens me to think that this guy, who is apparently bored with being s Senator and who is rich enough to buy yet another public office, is very likely to be our next governor.

But maybe, just maybe, he will clean up the Jersey Political Swamp.

Then again, maybe, just maybe, I’ll stick a feather in my ass and fly to Pittsburgh.