SAR #12109

Why think? It'll just make you unhappy.

Playing To The Cheap Seats: Faced with a continuing pinch in global petroleum supplies and rising gasoline prices in the US due to world market pressures, Obama firmly took aim at "the speculators" and asked for more power, more regulation and more belief in that making a profit from a scarce resource like oil (but not Apple stock) are evil. It is  just another political gimmick, one that Republican control of the House immediately turns into an empty gesture.

Conclusion: The rise in autism in the United States may be linked to the prevalence of high-fructose corn syrup in the American diet.

Second Time's A Charm: Banks are handing out new credit cards to people with subprime credit scores at a rate 12% above last year, and subprime cardholders debt is up 55%. subprime auto loans are up 6%. So far the banks haven't started handing out subprime mortgages, but it's early days.

Pig/Poke: ““I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go.” Mitt Romney.

Priorities: Republicans in the House have passed a budget that will shield the Pentagon from billions in cuts by reducing food stamp benefits by 11% a month and cutting 3 million people from the program.

America’s Mirror: The US no longer even pretends to live up to its much ballyhooed ideals, “we go to war and kill lots of people for no good reason, [our] elites have eliminated any accountability for themselves for criminal wrongdoing, we’ve tortured and assassinated people, and the response to massive economic suffering and related criminal fraud has been to give lots of free money to the people who caused it all.”

Miss March: Housing starts fell to 654K in March, 50,000 below expectations and 40,000 below February's downwardly revised 694K. Single-unit housing starts were in the same range they have been stuck in since June 2009.

The Migration Myth: Is there any evidence that people pick up and move just to get lower taxes? No, not really. Studies consistently show that taxes have little if any impact on the decision by people or corporations to relocate.

Non Sequiturs: Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council says that Secret Service agents were caught patronizing female prostitutes because we allow “ open homosexuality in our military.” Pat Robinson says that the absence of SUVs and oil refineries on Mars proves that global warming on Earth is a hoax. Fox News' contributor Sandy Rios says Barack Obama has a “disdain” for women. Don't tell Michelle.

Putting The Question: We can, and most likely will, increase the earth's human population to at least 9 billion. We can, and most likely will, extract and burn all the available coal, oil and natural gas. And we can, and obviously fully intend, to pile our public and private debts ever higher. But why?

Porn O'Graph: He's flatlined, Doctor Bernanke!