Beer as "vitally essential"

While the U.S. Supreme Court pretends to deliberate on whether or not to deny health care coverage to some 40 million Americans (we all know how this is going to turn out, don’t we?), a Lithuanian court has ruled that beer is “vitally essential” to that nation’s interests, blocking a strike of workers at a Carlsberg brewery, declaring the making and selling of beer to be an “essential service.” The ruling puts beer in the same class as medical supplies and drinking water. One has to wonder if it wouldn’t have been better for the Obama administration to bring in the Lithuanian lawyers to argue the case for health care insurance being “vitally essential” to our nation’s interests. Or at least they might have been able to raise beer to that stature for our country.