SAR #13080

History is full of ideas that seemed good at the time.

Bottom Line: A single currency requires a level of political cooperation (and control) that simply does not exist in Europe. The end.

Follow The Money: French police have searched IMF chief Christine Lagarde's Paris home in connection with an investigation into her role in the arbitration between Credit Lyonnais and tycoon Bernard Tapie which ended up with Tapie getting a 400 million euro settlement from the bank. The cops were not looking for her coq a vin recipe. This one will be fun to follow.

Whose Bull? Every time some Republican gets hit alongside the head by homegrown reality and decides that at least his kid should have the right to get married or get mental health coverage or any of the rest of these road-to-Damascus ah-ha moments, we are supposed to applaud. The Republican conversion experience is way over-rated. The new-found compassion is always narrowly focused on their own family's misfortune and never seems to lead to the realization there are a lot of families out there with a lot of different problems that need both compassion and a helping hand from their government. Full immersion or forget it.

The Question: Why is Iran willing to suffer economic and political isolation for its nuclear program? 1) Because the US has never attacked a nation that had nukes. 2) See number one.

Or Else: Germany's finance minister says that Cypriot banks are insolvent and that if Cyprus doesn't toe the line drawn in Brussels its banks may never reopen – implying that if they don't agree to a 10% loss, they'll lose everything. Maybe. But maybe not if Mr. Putin sees an opportunity to make some mischief.

Dots, Connecting The: Button, button, who's got the button? If the you think the 'button' is what's going on in Cyprus... wrong. It is about Cyprus in only the most tangential way, the central object was to manipulate the perceptions of the German voters so they would keep Angela and all the little Merkels in power. Now the EU/ECB/IMF needs to come up with something that will change the world's perception of them as a bunch of incompetents. And while they are at it they'll need to find a snappy little PR campaign to con Europe's citizenry into trusting the system. Whatever the system is today.

Cliff Note: To save you from plowing through all the 10-year anniversary navel-examinations, the question asked is 'What lessons have we learned from the Iraq war?' There are only two: They lied. And they got away with it. The war was a premeditated crime. The Iraqi's have always known 'the truth' about Bush, Cheney and the American Empire. So have we, but we pretend not to.

Savings: In the mid-2000's the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors reduced funding for the county's medical clinics in order to save money. Visits to the county clinics dropped by 80,000. Visits to the county's emergency rooms increased by... 80,000. Emergency room visits are way more expensive than the clinic visits.

You Are There: Where's an Edward R. Murrow to lay waste to Paul Ryan, our contemporary Joe McCarthy? Ryan is a serious nutcase, as was McCarthy, and shares Joe's penchant for falsehoods, unsupported allegations with no actual evidence, failure to address challenges to his purported facts and fractured math. And no one ever challenges his credentials, his specific objectives. Too bad this isn't a movie, where there'd be a good guy...

Logic, Y'all: In Texas they seem to have discovered a connection between male colonoscopies and abortion. Don't ask.

The Parting Shot:

 

Crane-fly Orchid, Tipularia discolor