SAR #12302

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Tic, Tic, Tic... Reports in Greece claim that the Troika gave Greece only to Sunday night (the 28^th) to accept the demanded labor 'reforms', “or else...” Or else what? Angelika will throw a hissy?

Call Me Mister: Chevron Corporation gave $2.5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, a SuperPAC working to elect Republicans to the House and Senate. Mr. Chevron, an established person and public minded citizen, is in the oil business.

Business Is Business: The US wants to prevent companies (and countries) from buying oil from Iran or selling grain to Iran. Most such trade is – or was – conducted in dollars, flowing through international banks. The US told the banks to behave, or else. So they are, more or less. But nobody said that Shell couldn't barter Cargill grain for Iranian oil and then settle up with Cargill later. The US is not really going to be fooled by this.

Rocking The Boat: The Italians – tens of thousands of them on the streets of Rome – didn't get Tim Geithner's memo instructing the European protectorates to be quiet and unseen until after the election. Seems they are not best pleased with the austerity measures of the Prime Minister the EU appointed after kicking Berlusconi – who they elected – out. Seems he's making threatening noises again, too.

Metamorphosis: In one paragraph detailing a drone strike in Yemen, the three individuals who were obliterated went from being A l-Qaeda militants, to suspects, to just being dead. There's a lot of that going around.

Stirring The Pot: Former Italian prime minister Berlusconi – who was chucked out of his elected office by the EU/IMF/ECB and has been sentenced to 4 years in jail for tax fraud – is now threatening to join the people in the streets and topple the Monti government. Won't that be fun?

Seigniorage: In the bad old days, in tough times the king would shave a tad off the kingdom's coinage – a way of inflating the treasury. If you didn't have access to good scales, you got taken. In the bad new days, banks in Vietnam have been caught... well, not shaving the gold bars, but simply selling them when they weren't theirs to sell. Now they get a chance to buy them back for a lot more than they sold them for. Heck of a deal.

Data Dump: The possibly reliable Nate Silver is giving Obama a 74% chance of re-election, with 50.3% of the popular vote and 295 electoral votes. So cue the fat lady. No, no, the other one!

Rocking the Cradle: In the Greek Parliament, MP Ilias Kasidiaris read aloud a passage from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic propaganda piece circulated and mandated in classrooms by the Nazis in 1930s Germany and one of Hitler's "justifications" for the Holocaust. None of the other MPs complained. Kasidiaris is the spokesman for Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-Nazi party that has grown to be the nation's third largest party, under whose leadership the group has taken to the streets (with police consent), terrorizing immigrants, and the police are reportedly colluding with them.

Fat Finger: In LaPorte County Indiana, 13,000 voters were purged from the rolls. By the wife of the county's Republican Party chair, when only 800 were supposed to be. Oops. Well, 11,000 were reinstated, so that's okay.

Caligula & The Gang: Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel (no, I don't actually know or recognize either of those names, but read on) showed a video at their wedding of homeless folks in Los Angeles wishing them well. The wedding cost $6.5 million. Everyone had a good time.

The Parting Shot:

Sentinels.