Hello, again, Everyone.  Another rainy and cool morning.  Hopefully it will clear off and dry out a bit later.  That is what it did yesterday.  The blueberry plants arrived yesterday and I want to get them in the container.  At least the rain takes care of watering the remaining plants.

I don't know how anyone can see this as democratic.  The amounts of money involved in politics is nothing less than obscene.  It makes prostitution look positively wholesome.  And the Damnocrats are equally rapacious.  Obama's reelection campaign hopes to raise $1 billion or more for the campaign.

I just turned off the morning news in disgust--again!!  CBS (local and national) had repeated extended stories about last night's episode of Dancing With The Stars.  I am so sick of the network spending significant portions of the news broadcasts for four (and sometimes more) days on that fluff program.  I don't mind them showing it but I absolutely hate having the damn thing shoved down my throat.  But CNN was not any better giving a lot of space to an allegedly racist and sexist 'bake sale' by some damned Repthuglican Student organization on a California Campus.  They supposedly wanted to highlight the inequities of affirmative action.  What I wish is that some more liberal group would hold a competing bake sale using the same distribution of prices to demonstrate how they reflect the pay disparity among groups.  But why does it deserve three days of free publicity.


Casey Daily Dispatch has a piece today that reflects much of my way of thinking on our foreign policy.  High school fights weren't (and probably aren't) a Southern thing.  We had plenty in my day also.  And he is absolutely correct in his assessment--the escalation is inevitable and increasingly costly.  Unfortunately, our foreign policy resembles nothing so much as the testosterone over-loaded high school pissing matches.  Perhaps I shouldn't use that image since the girls were as bad as the boys.  However, the bottom line is that we have spent at least three times the value of the property destroyed and lost more of our own peoples' lives that were killed in the attack and aftermath.  And that is simply our own losses.  I wish someone would do a good cost benefit analysis on this and tell me how in the hell it was worth it.  And don't give me any of that crap about how much more secure we are now than then because it is simply crap and not a valid 'gain.'

Talk about a whole boat load of honest--try this one from Crooks & Liars.  I loved the concluding remarks the trader made in his interview with Forbes cited in the post.  He thought what he said was old news and everyone knew the truth of the situation.  Yeah, we do--really we do.  But too many of us just want to pretend that it "isn't so, Joe."  Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has this to say on the matter.
Her last comment sent a bit of a chill up my spine.  Saying that Rastani presents a 'bland, reasonable face on predatory capitalism' reminded me of Hannah Arendt's description of Eichmann as the personification of the 'banality of evil.'