Good morning to you where ever you are.  Since nothing much is happening here I will see what is going on in our world today.

It looks like the looting of the middle class is accelerating.  And, as usual, it will hit those least able to respond flexibly to the losses that looting will cause.  I could hope that the congress might be sensible and bail out the pension funds just as they did the banks but I have long ago lost that hope.  Pension plans are worth just about as much as most insurance--which is about zero.

Another good post on Tomdispatch this morning penned by Tom Englehardt.  I have long argued that there are precious few differences between the two parties.  The Democrats are slightly more liberal on social issues while the Republicans are more right-wing, religious conservative.  Both seem to give only lip service to economic issues that will help the lower 90% of the economic food chain.  As Englehardt notes they are both part of a "war party" and vote the interests of the military/industrial complex, to use Eisenhower's phrase.

Gene Logsdon has another good take on herbicide resistant weeds and the chemical industry that aims to get rid of them.  You would think that they would take notice of the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria which, thanks to our misuse of the drugs, are now becoming resistant to multiple families of antibiotics.  But the powers that be in industrial agriculture don't question their tactics any more than the "war party" in Washington.

I have been reading stories about the controversy, in Europe especially, over Muslim women wearing their traditional veils.  It doesn't seem to matter what level of veiling the women practice but someone objects.  France has passed strict anti-veiling laws and other countries seem interested in following suit.  Today I came across this story and wondered if these women would face the same, often violent, reaction.  Especially if they decided to extend the tradition beyond church.