Good Friday morning to you all.  We expect highs in the 90s again with heat index readings in the low 100s.  We have already closed up and turned on the air.  I will go out in a bit and water everything but all serious work in the gardens will wait until tomorrow and later.  I checked everything.  The roses are happy in the large containers; they are blooming well.  The verbena and rosemary are putting out new growth, as I noted yesterday.

Have you seen the latest news reports on those whole body scanners?  They, according to a German study, cannot tell the difference between body sweat or the pleats in pants and explosives.  After the billions of dollars spent in the panic over security we find we have a very unreliable system that fails to live up to the promise.  And what about the almost hysterical ramp up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11?  This is the 'home of the brave?'

Get ready for FAA rumble--round 2!!  How anyone can call this governing I have no idea.

It seems that the big banks have more problems than just the 50 state attorneys general and the renegade AGs who aren't willing to go along with white washing the criminal fraud the banks and mortgage services engaged (and are engaging?) in.  Now the Federal Housing Finance Agency is getting into the act suing to recover some of the billions Fanny and Freddy lost because of the debacle.  The recent trend has been to privatize profits while transferring the losses to the public (read: taxpayers).  Maybe we will see a bit of a reversal of that.

I am watching the CNN report this morning and they just reported the August jobs report: no non-farm jobs created.  HuffingtonPost has this story just released.  What I found really depressing--the economic pundits predict that we won't see any improvement in the employment numbers until.....2017.

I always like to read about techniques other people use in their gardens (container or otherwise).  Often they can meet one of my needs or increase my efficiency.  If they don't apply now they might in the futures.  SurvivalMom has an interesting post this morning describing techniques she used while living in Kenya and Botswana where they had to deal with water scarcity/unreliability and heat.  I really liked the suggestion for 'thread watering' and have filed the info away for any time we might have water restrictions here.  We came close a couple of times.  Her description of the container gardens in Botswana is very intriguing.

I was just read this to Mom.  She said the Obama is cornered.  Yeah, but---the man simply won't fight for anything.  And I wish someone would stand up to the Repthuglicans and their business masters and demand that they tell us how in the hell economic growth will do us any good if we can't breath the air, drink the water or eat the food grown in contaminated soil and watered with poisoned water.  I remember reading, a good many years ago, a story about the mountain peak in New Mexico named for Kit Carson.  The reporter asked a local native American if they resented having a nearby peak named for a white man who had so actively slaughtered Indians.  He said hell, no.  Carson was always up front and they knew he was no friend.  Naming that peak for him was at least more honest than naming it for some other white man who pretended to be a friend while stabbing them in the back.  Right now that is how I feel about Obama and the Repthuglicans.  The Repthuglicans are no friends to ordinary Americans but at least they are marginally honest.  Obama says he understands but he is singing out of the Repthuglican hymnal.

With all of the 'remembrances' of 9/11 coming up here is a look back over the '9/11 decade' that is informative and disturbing.  For those who have the stomach for it, here is a link to Frank Rich's New York Magazine piece.  It is brutal and uncompromising--and right on the money.

This is an interesting little article given the increasing appearance of antibiotic resistant (often to multiple antibiotics) bacteria.  The genes for resistance have existed in bacteria for at least 30k years.

Good morning, All. Most of the news remains focused on Hurricane Irene. Our local news this morning noted that a local (Chicago) Guard unit had been activated to help in the aftermath. That is what the Guard should be used for--disasters here at home. Several bloggers noted that our wonderfully sensitive and caring Repthuglicans are insisting that any disaster relief be paid for with further cuts in the budget. (Sarcasm alert.)

I am back to reading (and maybe posting) after a session with the spearmint that is turning out to be more work than I had thought. I intended simply to cut it back and dry another batch but I found that all I had left was a bunch of bare, woody stems. So I cut it down entirely except for a few sprigs that were very low. I will cut a few of those out and transplant them to small pots to nurture over the winter. Otherwise, I will clean out the entire pot and wash it out for next season. I am not unhappy with the experiment--I hadn't grown spearmint for nearly two decades. I got three large cuttings from it and will enjoy it in my tea during the cold months. Next year I may put it on the fence and try to keep it smaller. And I just finished totally with the operations on the spearmint. I have two small cuttings with good root systems in small pots on a shelf of the mini-greenhouse. I also changed my usual procedure for cleaning out the pot. It was incredibly root bound. I could have chopped up the rootball but this is a very invasive plant and I decided to simply discard the rootball entirely. I really don't want to be pulling spearmint out of other plants because the roots (like the arms of a starfish) spawned new organisms from the pieces.

Joshua Brown at Reformed Broker has an excellent take on pundits of all stripes--not just the financial pundits.