SAR #14093

We will go to any extreme, spend any amount to hang on to our lives one more day, yet do nothing to extend the life of our civilization. 

 
Let Them Eat Cake: Paul Ryan is back with a more-or-less new budget, one that will cut the taxes of the rich by 37% and the programs directed towards the poor by $500 million a year, while giving the war machine $280 million a year more. He is also going to cut $19 billion from the US Postal Service - which is a real trick because the USPS gets no federal funding. The rest of his budget is just as honest.

Explanation: As part of his drive to change things to his liking, after 30 years of wedded bliss Mr. Putin is divorcing Mrs. Putin. He gets custody of Crimea.

Dividends And Conquer: The Supremes have once again ruled that all dollars are created equal and if you've got more of 'em, you are more equal. Judge Roberts ruled that limiting political bribery would “intrude without justification on a citizen’s ability to exercise the most fundamental First Amendment activities - buying politicians.” 
 
Victory Is In Slight: We added 191,000 workers to the rolls in March, up a tad from last month's (remember the snow?) 178,000. Neither figure keeps up with the number of new job seekers entering the economy.

Full Employment: In an effort to keep constitutional lawyers busy, Mississippi has passed a bill that would permit businesses to refuse to serve people as long as they pretended it was against their religion to tolerate blacks and gays. As if Mississippi wasn't already first in most of the categories no other state wants to be first in, like obesity and ignorance. 
 
American Hero: Home-grown American industrial giant Caterpillar is so proud to be an American success that it has ducked paying over $2 billion in US taxes in the last decade. It's probably all legal. Immoral, but legal. And required by the capitalist ethos.
 
This Time It's Different? The last 500 years should have taught us that the warnings we've gotten from senior US officials were accurate: when a government spies on its own people it is always about exerting power and stifling criticism from the proles. It is never to protect us from the bad guys. And it has always led to tyranny. for over 40 years the government has called disidents 'terrorists' to justify spying on us them. 
 
Yes, But: A federal court has ruled that the drastic purge of voter rolls in Florida just before the 2012 elections was illegal. Florida doesn't care.

We're Number One! The American Association for the Advancement of Science says that “the rate of climate change now may be as fast as any extended warming period over the past 65 million years, and it is projected to accelerate in the coming decades.” Our future will include "abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes in the earth’s climate system with massively disruptive impacts,” including the possible “large scale collapse of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, collapse of part of the Gulf Stream, loss of the Amazon rain forest, die-off of coral reefs, and mass extinctions.” And it'll be a tad uncomfortable in Anytown, USA, too.

Plausible Rumors: Despite the GOP's assurances of doom, government-funded health care is not an evil. Every advanced country does it (and the fact that the US does not eliminates it from the 'advanced' category), and they provide better healthcare to their citizens at lower costs. But the insurance companies are why we don't and won't have single-payer universal healthcare. Yes, Obamacare sucks - but only because the insurance companies couldn't be elbowed out of the trough. It was the best we could do, given the Republicans and their owners.

Over Your Dead Body: Missouri wants to make it a crime to ask the federal government for information about farms and factories that are peddling diseased animals to the public. Just asking is to be a crime. When disease breaks out in a factory farm, journalists would not be allowed access to data about the threat to the public. The US Constitution allows the states to tell the Federal government what it can do, doesn't it?

Lottery: In the last couple of months, GM has recalled over 2.5 million vehicles. Last year they sold about 9.7 units. If you have a car built by GM over the last decade, the odds of GM killing you just to save a few bucks are pretty low.

Porn O'Graph: The barbaric metal ages well.

The Parting Shot: