"Let my spirit carry me.../'Til I'm free/Oh, Lord, through the revolution..."

"I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who's worked in New Hampshire politics."

"It's very real. It's very serious. This morning, on this show, is not the venue for me to lay out all the evidence.... I'm saying anybody—George, go to New Hampshire. Talk to anybody who has worked in politics there for a long time. Everybody is aware of the problem in New Hampshire."

Said Stephen Miller. He was talking to George Stephanopoulos, who kept asking for evidence, when all he needed to do was go to New Hampshire and ask anybody.... everybody in New Hampshire knows.

Joe Scarborough is so upset with Stephen Miller that he can't let Mika Brzezinski get a word in edgewise.

But she does get in a good deal of theatrical mime of the think-I'm-gonna-barf and yikes-I'm-fainting variety.



Joe's main point seems to be what a terrible communicator Stephen Miller is, which I interpret to mean that Stephen Miller really got his job done.

Joe's secondary point is that everybody knows judicial supremacy is written in the nation's founding documents. How about getting a law professor on the show who can calmly talk about the scope of judicial review, including the limits on it? It's ridiculous for Scarborough to just emote for 10 minutes on the subject. There's a difference between judicial independence and judicial supremacy and there are any number of other details that might be enlightening. Instead we get Scarborough arguing basically by showing how upset he is... he and his shushed-up sidekick Mika.

Ironically, he's purporting to loathe the strong, absolute speaking style of Stephen Miller, but he's a more extreme example of the same kind of thing.

"If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree."

Early peaches, this morning:



Peaches on a peach tree naturally makes me think of song lyrics, and I found this on Wikipedia:

The ‘peaches’ verse ["If you don't like my peaches/Don't you shake my tree/'n Get out of my orchard/Let my peaches be," in "Sitting on Top of the World"] has a long history in popular music. It appears as the chorus of an unpublished song composed by Irving Berlin in May 1914: “If you don't want my peaches / You'd better stop shaking my tree.” The song "Mamma's Got the Blues", written by Clarence Williams and S. Martin and recorded by Bessie Smith in 1923, has the line: "If you don't like my peaches then let my orchard be". In her version of "St. Louis Blues", Ella Fitzgerald sang, "If you don't like my peaches, why do you shake my tree? / Stay out of my orchard, and let my peach tree be". In 1929 Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded “Peach Orchard Mama” ("... you swore nobody’d pick your fruit but me / I found three kid men shaking down your peaches free"). In later years lines using similar imagery were used in “Matchbox” by Carl Perkins and “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band. Ahmet Ertegun was able to convince Miller to pay him US$50,000, claiming authorship of the line in his song "Lovey Dovey". This verse and its ubiquitous usage is an example of the tradition of ‘floating lyrics’ (also called 'maverick stanzas') in folk-music tradition.

In "The Joker," it's "You're the cutest thing that I ever did see/I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree." Video.

"Matchbox" is the most familiar one to me, and it's the version I've put in the post title: "If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree." (Here's Carl Perkins, performing the song I learned from The Beatles.) Though the history of the "floating lyric" suggests the opposite, Carl is talking about the masculine anatomy.