SAR #15098

We each think we are special, in some essentially undefinable way.

Starting Blocked: Rand Paul announced that he was running for the presidency in order to “take our country back”. Way back; at least to the middle of Atlas Shrugged. 
 
The Smedley Butler Brigade: The US Marines are dispatching 250 troops from of the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force-South to one of the US bases in Honduras. (Yes, bases, as in plural – didn't you know?) Equipped with a high-speed JHSV Spearhead catamarans, four Super Stallion helicopters" and air support from Osprey tilt rotor fighters and KC-130 tankers, the unit can operate for at least 60 days “without external assistance.” They are being deployed, it said in the press release, to train forces “in the region”, engage in anti-drug operations and to render “humanitarian assistance,” in a nation that has one of the highest murder rates in the world, thanks to drug trafficking and US military interference with democracy going back decades.

Meanwhile at The Recovery: As of February, only (!) 5.36% of mortgages were delinquents and another 1.58% were in foreclosure, which means that about 7% of all mortgages were somewhere in the foreclosure process. That's 3,500,000 properties, which is 175% of what used to be considered normal. 
 
Seems Like Old Times: Because the Saudis are burning through their ammo stocks rather rapidly in their attack on Yemeni civilian homes and churches, the US is accelerating its weapons supplies to the Sunni coalition in their fight against the Iranian-backed Shia forces that kicked the US out of the country a couple of weeks ago. 
 
Vacation Planning: Now is the optimum time to plan that trip to Banf to view the glaciers of Alberta and British Columbia, because by 2100 they'll be mostly gone – say by 90% in the Rockies and at least 70% along the Pacific. The bad news is, of course, that they're going to melt. The good news is that their melting may temporarily make up for some of the rainfall shortages. But the bad news is by 2100 the melt water from the glaciers will only be found on the National Geographic channel, when they run the special on how the glacial melt water raised the oceans by 15 inches - about the same that the Greenland melt did, but only half the three feet the Antarctic ice fields plunked into the oceans. My, my, won't that be fun!

Blaming The Victim: In California, M. Marc Kelly, Orange County Superior Court Judge, cut a child molester's 25 to life sentence to 10 years because he didn't go out and stalk or abduct the three year old child. She just wandered into the garage where he was playing a video game and he became irresistibly excited and just had to sodomize her. He didn't mean to hurt her, the judge said, speaking from experience. 
 
America The Beautiful: An elementary teacher in an OK public school handed out Bibles to her class. NC's elected leadership wants to prohibit medical schools from teaching prospective doctors abortion procedures. A GA court clerk refuses to type up transcripts of a judge and some deputies calling a black witness a N-word. In Orange, TX, the KKK a bunch of wannabes are putting 32 Confederate battle flags around a Civil War memorial on Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. Over the weekend, police in Zion, IL shot a black teenager in the back, twice, killing him. In SC a cop was videoed shooting a black man in the back. 
 

Porn O'Graph: The non-participants.