SAR #14046

Now can we talk about climate change?

Equal Time: The secret police at Homeland Security, tired of the NSA getting all the bad press for spying on Americans, are planning to track you visually by grabbing the data from all the traffic cameras in the nation and building a data base of where every car was every day, everywhere there is a camera. Why? Because they can. And you are a potential terrorist, didn't you know?

Shocker: Rich people lean to the political right, and it doesn't matter how they got rich - inheritance, actual hard work, or winning the lottery.

Because Equality: Billionaire Tom Perkins, previously known for his fear that the peasants were coming after the rich, now says that all our problems could be saved if America's voting laws were changed to award one vote for each dollar of taxes paid. We have met the enemy and one of them is named Tom Perkins.

Practice, Practice, Practice: Pope Francis says that living together is both an art and a fascinating journey. Like any other art, you have to practice it to get good at it. 
 
Back To Basics: Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and renowned constitutional revisionist, says that contrary to the belief of many and 200 years of Suprem Court rulings, diversity of belief is not tolerated under our Constitution. And it should be so, because “America does not sustain and create faith. Faith created and sustains America.” He held up Hobby Lobby's hate-filed refusal to give its 13,000 employees, mostly women, health care as a model for his version of “exercising its religious freedom.”

Vocabulary Test: In the phrase “the dignity of work”, what does 'dignity' mean? 
 
Patching The Oil Patch: Remember all those peak-oil predictions of higher costs to find petroleum resulting in lower production at ever higher per-barrel costs? Don't look now, but big oil is cutting back on exploration because it costs too much. Expenses have grown but discoveries and production have not increased correspondingly. No, no, it's not peak oil. It's peak affordable oil, and always was. 
 
Volunteers: Tennessee's Republicans, trying to retain their position in the competition to be the dumbest in the South, now want to make it explicitly legal to discriminate against LGBT people in the course of ordinary business as an act of religious faith. Imagine the lunch counter sit-ins. Leaders of the Kansas GOP are tring to find enough votes to defeat a bill that passed the lower house which makes it legal (nearly mandatory) to discriminate against gays. It is limited to gays because everybody knows that lesbians are cure and bisexuals and the trans-gendered are mythical creatures, like unicorns and honest bankers. 
 
Cold Front: Foreclosure filings across the US last month jumped 8% m/m. In New Jersey foreclosure activity reached a 40-month high. In California foreclosure starts in January suddenly jumped 57%. Unexpectedly. Etc. Etc. Etc. Oh, and on another front, US factory production fell the most in four years. Maybe it's the whether.

Porn O'Graph: Walks like, talks like... 
 
The Parting Shot:

 Snaggletooth, the trumpetfish.