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While we’re either gnawing our knuckles or blissfully unaware there’s a debt ceiling hostage crisis now in its —th week . . . While the putatively Democratic President again invites the Republican House leaders to the White House over the weekend to discuss how the federal budget can be trimmed further to accommodate those gentlemen’s concerns while getting nothing in return for the revenue-starved U.S. Treasury, we thought some relevant amusement might be in order.

In this clip from the mid 1930s, Louisiana senator (and effectively still governor) Huey P. Long uses an old country anecdote about a drummer (salesman) of patent medicines called High Popalorum and Low Popahirum—depending on whether the tree’s bark is stripped from the top down or the bottom up—to describe the difference between “the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership” in Congress.

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