Good morning, all.  Much above normal temps to start out today but falling, they say, through the day.  Also some sporadic rain.  No snow yet.

Hi, Kay, and I also never miss Jan's posts.  Her blog is on my reading list.

Didn't have much to say yesterday.  The Repthuglican circus continues.  One of the clowns decided to call it quits and all of the talking heads are speculating on which of the remaining clowns will be helped most and how much.  It doesn't matter to me since none of the front runners appeal to me at all.

I doubt anyone is surprised at this story.  These cuts have been in the works for weeks.  Some years ago relatives suggested I apply for a job with the Postal Service: good pay, good retirement, and job security.  Well, at the time they weren't hiring and the ads for Postal Service jobs were posted by scammers.  If the plan to close half of the processing centers comes to pass, there will be a whole lot more unemployed people.

Rick Hanauer  posted a good op-ed at Bloomberg.  His confession that he and others in the 1% are not the 'job creators' the Repthuglican idiots claim reflects my own thoughts.  We have a consumer economy.  We can set aside the argument of whether we should have such an economy for another time and simply consider the fact that,  if 99% of the population can't consume, the 1% can't carry the economy.

William DeBuys posted this on Tomdspatch which should interest anyone following climate/weird weather issues.  I am glad that many areas of the Southwest got rain and snow over the last month but the dry spell is no where near over.  Unfortunately, in the back of my mind dwells the notion that we may be past the point of doing anything about the situation--we may have already tripped over the transition and didn't even realize it.

June Calendar at Big-70 has a comment that echoes our sentiments here.  I am glad we aren't the only ones complaining about the tasteless, chemical laden crap our food industry is trying to sell us.  I say 'trying' because we have gone well past the point where we ain't buying'.

To continue on the 'hell in a hand basket' theme, go to Clusterfuck Nation and read Kunstler's latest.  Every time I hear some business suited idiot proclaim that business needs 'certainty' to pull the country out of the economic doldrums my cynicism starts itching.  They have plenty of certainty.  Not a single bankster has been prosecuted the fraud that was and is so pervasive in our financial industry has been prosecuted.  And, according to 60 Minutes last night, there is plenty to prosecute.  And I wonder how big the tab is really going to be in the final analysis and how much our supposedly private banks have pushed onto the public purse.

The Russian parliamentary elections have certainly turned dramatic.  Putin's party got less than 50% of the vote inspire of allegations of fraud that would make an old time Chicago politician blush.  The presidential elections are yet to come but, though Putin is expected to win, one has to wonder what it bodes for Russia's macho man.  I wonder how one says 'vote early, vote often' in Russian.

As we listened to the report on the news this morning detailing the U.S. loss of a stealth reconnaissance drone the Iran has claimed it has recovered, I had a bit of a flash back to several stories about hacking into U.S. military systems.  I wondered if somehow the drone systems had been hacked.  This piece, found by way of The Agonist, quotes from an Iranian news outlet which claims that is exactly what happened.  Of course we are getting information from two equally notoriously unreliable sources--the Iranians and the U.S. military.