It's the 65th anniversary of the first battle between the US Military and aliens over Roswell NM in 1947. That's as good of a story as any. It might explain the many trillions spent on "defense" since. Surely the critics who say we have just been supporting the lifestyles of a few hundred millionaires with all that money are wrong.

After all, President Eisenhower gave several speeches warning us against dangers the Alien Industrial Complex, and how we needed massive diversions of money away from schools and hospitals to combat it.

In June, the private sector added 84,000 and government cut 4,000 jobs. The good news is that with government revenues stabilizing, there are signs that the massive losses in public employment may be coming to an end. Still, since May 2010, the government sector has cut 1.04 million jobs. At the same time, since February 2010, the private sector has added 4.35 million jobs. The thing is that most of these government job cuts occurred in the Red states, and they are same states that aren’t producing private sector jobs either. Blue states are even adding government jobs as their economies start to recover.

Another part of the problem with slow job creation is the lack of skilled workers, but businesses refuse to provide job training, or pay high enough wages to allow workers to go to school. Raise taxes to support education? Of course not.

Initial Jobless Claims are down again this week putting in doubt the prognostication that we’re going into the double dip recession. That would be the recession that the Republicans have been working so hard to engineer before the election. Jobless Claims are in fact down 15% from this time last year. This is of no comfort for those who have become permanently unemployed under the universal corporate policy of never hiring people who are unemployed. A permanent oblivion that workers can be cast into focuses the minds of the Neo-feudal serfs.

Gasoline prices continue fall putting cash in the hand of consumers, and retailers are hoping this will trigger a huge surge in back to school sales. There is a certain amount of pent up consumer demand, and the urge to buy stuff for the kids is usually a leading indicator of renewed consumer confidence.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is after the our friends over at JP Morgan Chase for rigging wholesale electricity prices to the tune of $73m. You thought that activity went away with the collapse of Enron? These crooks will steal anything that isn’t nailed down, well okay, they will pry up the nails too. They aren’t the only people the FERC has been going after, Obama was delayed in appointing people by Republicans in the Senate, but things are finally starting to happen.

The FERC has been going after other “banks” (that’s a questionable term) for stealing hundreds of millions by illegal trading schemes. And, this is only the low hanging fruit. More complex schemes, and strategies that were de-criminalized by Reagan, and his successors, have cost us billions if not trillions.

Markets Crash as the Obamacare Tax Increase is Approved by the Liberal Court, this was the screaming headline on the so-called news from the right. The markets did take a big plunge before clawing back, but it probably had to do with it leaking out that JP Morgan’s losses aren’t $2 billion as reported. Current internal estimates put the losses at $9 billion, and there’s no guarantee that is even close to the actual size of this cash hemorrhage. When we say “too big to fail“, that’s not what we mean exactly.

The rightwing lie machine is running full speed on the tax angle, and since they seemed to have the talking points already in line that might explain why Roberts went that way. There was no question that the Commerce Clause argument was sufficient, the Righties on the bench have had no problem using it to justify their rulings in the past. Rush is spouting the talking point that it‘s the “biggest tax increase in history”.

This is the last day of spring, or - in the new Global Warming reality - the end of the “First Summer”, the “Third Summer” will be here in three months. The traditional or “Second Summer” could just be shortened to “Hell”.

New farming methods may become necessary, -maple syrup production in Wisconsin was cut by 2/3 this year because winter ended so abruptly. A hard frost killed almost all the fruit crops across the midwest because everything bloomed a month too early. In this new reality it doesn’t matter that the mechanical corn planters spray a highly effective nano-particle insecticide on the seeds and this is now know conclusively to be killing all the honey bees. The bees aren’t really needed, they’re as obsolete as unionized teachers, firefighters and bridge inspectors.