SAR #8352

Remember, the government doesn't actually have any of this money.

And Now, In the Center Ring: Having ridden its one trick pony to 0.25%, the Fed seems to have quickly jumped to its new solution: printing lots and lots of money. Don't worry about inflation, Ben's got A Plan.

Told You So! Arctic sea ice is shrinking faster than any of the IPCC's 19 climate models predict, and the rate of loss is accelerating. As cyrosphere scientist Dr. Julienne Strove of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center said, "Simply put, it's a case of we hate to say we told you so, but we did."

Selective Memory: November's CPI data is out, with a record 1.7% drop in prices. Of course that's including the drop in food and energy prices, which all summer long they told us didn't count.

Pulling the Plug: NASA satellite data shows that over 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted away in the last 5 years, half of it from Greenland. Greenland's share would fill up Chesapeake Bay eleven times over, and the melt there appears to be accelerating.

Smaller Government: When they set out to starve the beast, the Republicans forgot to take into consideration what would happen when the beast got very, very hungry.

Plantagenets: Princess Caroline , daughter of Camelot's slain John F. and niece of Edward, Duke of Massachusetts, is seeking to replace Baroness Hillary in the House of Lording it Over All. Lady Hillary, exiled King Bill's consort, has been elevated to duties as counselor to the New Court forming over the ashes of George II.

...Nor Any Drop to Drink: The GAO foresees water shortages affecting 36 states within the next 5 years. I foresee higher water bills.

Drilled Here, Now What: Looking for natural gas, a drilling rig in Indonesia hit mud, causing a mud volcano. Now, two and a half years later, mud continues to bubble up, spreading across fields and roads while the land sinks. The slump may reach a depth 140 meters.

Opposites Attract: When run by a bunch of kleptocrats, a capitalist society has turned out to be as flawed as communism. The end results will look very similar, too.

Gage: Even with the full-time efforts of the Secretary of the Treasury focused on its well being, Goldman Sachs was unable to avoid reporting a $2.3 billion loss for 4Q08. Think how bad things would have been without Uncle Hank's help.

Scenery: What did you think the economy foreseen by those who preached Peak Oil would look like, if not this?

Starting Point: The Center for Constitutional Rights, citing Congressional findings placing responsibility for the Pentagon's torture of captives squarely on Rumsfeld, is calling for his prosecution as a war criminal. Joining him should be Dick Cheney, who has publicly confessed to giving official sanction to waterboarding and other tortures. The Senate Armed Services Committee report also placed the responsibility squarely on George W. Bush, as should we all.

The Future Awaits: Germany, which is suffering a 1.75% decline in GDP this quarter, anticipates a 3% decline in GDP for 2009.

Words vs Deeds: The headline read "AIG sells $39.3B of mortgage-backed securities to Maiden Lane." If you didn't know that Maiden Lane was an alias of the NY Fed, you wouldn't have known that Uncle Sam paid AIG $20 billion for a pig in a poke.

Be Seeing the Light: After a decade of cornucopian predictions, the IEA has acknowledged that by 2020 global oil production will begin an inexorable decline.

Porn O'Graph: House that?