SAR #13239

Everyone likes a happy ending...

Nostalgia: A few members of Congress, who haven't been paying attention for the last decade or two, think Obama needs Congressional authorization to start another war. Silly. It won't be a war. You think the administration that hassn't seen Morsi's removal by the military as a coup is going to have trouble finding verbal camouflage for anther Great Adventure? 
 
Fun And Profit: Google (and others) were paid millions of dollars by NSA (if not by the CIA) to help them violate all sorts of privacy statements and reassurances while advancing State Department and CIA agendas around the world. Back in the 1930's there was a word for this sort of thing... fascism.

'Unexpectedly' Meets The Recovery: Orders for durable goods fell 7.3% in July, indicating that US manufacturing's recovery will be a bit less robust than the fan club claimed.
 
Dance Steps: Why has the Fed given up on America’s unemployed? Last year's theory was that almost all US unemployment was cyclical and thus reparable through stimulus. So Ben kept giving money to the banks and pretended it was a stimulus. Now high unemployment (even masked by other factors) is becoming a fact of life. Next year we'll see 7% cited as the 'natural rate of unemployment'. Seems that the cyclical part of unemployment is only curable in an expanding economy. Seems that giving Goldman Sachs sacks of money drives up asset prices without driving down employment. Oh, well, they tried – not too hard, but a little. Time to tighten monetary policy and make unemployment worse, just in case inflation might still be a word in the dictionary.

Asked & Equivocated: “Can you solve a debt problem with more debt?” Maybe, just maybe... Not in the real world, of course, but who lives there anyway?

Three, Two, One, Zero: Global warming is not something that is going to suddenly happen come January 1, 2100. It is already happening. It is happening in our forests - they are drying out and burning. It is seen in our more frequent and harsher storms and hurricanes. It is acidifying our oceans a rate unparalleled in the life of the oceans for at least 250 million years ' setting up feedback cycles that will make future unrecognizable. At the rate we're not doing anything about the 90 million tones of CO2 we dump into the atmosphere every day, January 2100 may not happen on a world we'd recognize. Business as usual is a suicide pact. Burning all that shale gas is playing Russian Roulette with an automatic. We – you and me and that fellow over there - we need to reduce our CO2 emissions. To zero. Very suddenly. 
 
Keep Your Charity At Home: The Raleigh, NC City Council, at the behest of the good old boy developers and real estate speculators, is pressuring the police to 'clean up' downtown by threatening to arrest charity groups for feeding the homeless – which they've been doing for six years. But that was before the homeless became an inconvenience to redevelopment profits.

Acts Of Contrition: Obama has granted Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest permanent absolution for any and all of the war crimes they instigated, ordered, or condoned while in office. They cannot be sued, no matter how egregious their crimes. The President most certainly hopes that what goes around comes around.

The Parting Shot:

 Stumped.