He didn’t say tobacco farmers, he said farmers, period.
You are Leonard Nimoy, and I claim my five dollars.
Or, to quote (well, paraphrase) a bumper sticker, “If you complain about farmers, don’t talk with your mouth full.”
I think you all are missing the big picture here. Please refer to the following quote from the linked article:
The guy they have trying to calm everyone’s fears about this is named… SCOTT FEAR! I wonder if he’s related to Scott Evil? Cousins? Clones, maybe?
Ok, this guy is 50 years old. He’s about to lose his farm, which has been in his family since the 20s. He lives alone. His neighbors state that he’s not been acting himself in the last couple of months due to stress and worry about losing his farm. Normally he is just a nice, friendly farmer. Doesn’t matter that he’s a tobacco farmer, it’s hard for farmers today no matter what they grow. Seems he’s gone off the deep end, but still, most of his friends and neighbors cannot imagine him with a bomb.
The guy’s mental. Sad really.
And yes the government is part of the problem. They want to control what, how much, etc. the farmer grows. My father was a farmer for part of his life. Geesh they used to send him mail long after he no longer farmed offering him money to grow this and that, but not other things.
Ok so you’re about to lose your farm so the obvious solution is to drive your tractor into a pond in Washington, DC? I don’t get how anyone could think that driving a tractor into a pond is going to make a damn bit of difference as to whether you lose your farm or not…
I woke up this morning and saw Lee Highway backed up as far as the eye could see so I said “Fuck it” and walked my ass to the Metro.
ultress, that’s how price supports work. The alternative, of course, is the free market.
This turkey would probably have gone broke ages ago if there was a free market in tobacco growing, because anyone who wanted to could grow tobacco, and the price per bushel would plummet.
There may be an argument for subsidizing the production of some basic foodstuffs. But there’s absolutely no need for subsidized tobacco growing. This guy, with his jeep and flatbed and his fancy tractor that doesn’t exactly scream “secondhand” or “economy model”, has been getting an undeserved free ride for all these years, courtesy of the U.S. government, and is apparently mad as hell that the gravy train’s grinding to a stop.
I’d say it’s time to beat him over the head with a clue stick.
Do clue sticks have nails sticking out of them?
They should.
WASHINGTON (AP) - What does it take to create havoc in the capital of the most powerful country in the world? Anthrax? An orange terror alert? Massive anti-war protests? Another day like Sept. 11, 2001? These days, it’s a disgruntled farmer in a tractor. Dwight Watson, 50, of Whitakers, N.C., drove his tractor into a pond near Washington’s monuments Monday. Since then he has kept law enforcement at bay. Streets remained closed for blocks, traffic was snarled for miles and several bus routes were altered. “What this shows is, one or two people can really throw a metropolitan area into chaos,” said Richard Clarke, who recently retired as one of the longest-serving, senior counterterrorism officials in the White House. “I assume that the sniper incident, the anthrax incidents and perhaps the tractor incident are not lost on people who might want to make further mischief in the future.”
They ought to just beanbag his ass. FYI he is against the war in Iraq.
Nice lapse in homeland security.
While I think that ultress has a degree of sympathy for this fellow’s plight which many of the rest of us do not share due to a lack of first hand experience, I seriously doubt that she’s actually advocating Mr. Watson’s actions, which are dragging the federal government’s nerve-center to a standstill on the eve of a fucking war.
Right, ultress? Please tell me we agree.
Dwight Watson just surrendered.
A quote from fark.com that had me laughing for 5 minutes
Good deal. Let’s subsidize his housing for the next 6 months.
When they celebrated New Years Eve for 2000 many young people started playing in the reflecting pond trying to get home and/or out of the crowds. I don’t see the big deal of him placing his tractor in a foot and half of water and sitting there over night. I am sure it was an attention ploy to show the government his plight. It still made me laugh though. I am just glad I don’t have to drive around that shit during the day.
The guy should be growing weed, man. Then he could have saved himself the drive up from NC. The feds woulda paid a friendly little visit on him.
If he did have explosives, wouldn’t the water act as a cushion of sorts, absorbing most of the charge?
—Because of global political reality, if the only people in America who grew food were those who could turn a profit doing so, you wouldn’t be eating tonight.—
Buzz. No. Wrong answer. What is “profitable” CHANGES in accordance to how much we want to eat tonight. It makes no sense to claim that we need to tax people to pay farmers to grow food so we can buy it from them. If we weren’t taxed, first of all we could afford to buy more, and second of all, if supply was limited, we’d also DEMAND more, meaning that farming would become more profitable, not less.
The idea that we need to subsidize farming in order to have enough to eat is laughable. Do we need to subsidize toothpaste in order to have enough to brush our teeth?
—Calling farmers welfare queens is fucking ignorant, since they work hard to perform a service society needs a whole hell of a lot more than some schmuck pushing paper in DC.—
I might agree about the schmuck in DC (who’s generally pushing paper in support of more corporate welfare for big agribusiness), but LOTS of people in LOTS of different industries work hard to perform services that society needs. The problem is: society can pay for what it needs without needing to shuffle money all over the place for no particular reason. Society currently has to deal with a huge glut of inefficient farmers who, if not for the subsidies, might have long ago chosen other professions.