The most powerful man on the planet dropped into visit the people in Iowa who helped launch his climb to power. No, I don’t mean President Obama, I mean Vice President Xi Jinping (shee jeen ping). In a year he will ascend to the Presidency, or as he’s known in China, Comrade Chairman of Communist Party Central Committee.

Despite a heavy diplomatic schedule, Comrade Xi insisted on stopping to visit the farm family in Iowa who put him up in their spare room for two nights in 1985. He was a minor party official from a remote agricultural province back then, seeking to improve pork production in China. He succeeded, and next year he will begin overseeing a five year plan that will leapfrog the People’s Republic past the United States as the world's dominant economic power.

The evening news starts almost every day with a scary story about the price of gas going to $5.00 by Memorial Day, and how bad that would be for the economy. They usually follow with a story about Iran threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, or maybe that will be lead story today.  They don’t mention that that currently the largest manufactured export from the US is gasoline.

The oil companies are even closing refineries because they can’t get rid of enough gasoline to justify running them, but still the corporate media dutifully report that the “shortage” of gasoline is driving up the price.

Tales from Uncle Remus (apologies to the author, the part of Brer Fox will be played by Brer Rabbit)

Brer Rabbit had a problem. He had been elected to be leader of the Free Forest after defeating grumpy old Brer Bear and his running mate Brer Cuckoo Bird, but lately it was a hard life in the forest. So Brer Rabbit set about first thing to fix the healthcare system of the forest. The ideas he was able to get passed by the Critter Congress weren’t all that good, but they were a big improvement over letting the predators run the system. They tended to eat the sick, especially the middle-class animals who they hated most awful.

$25 billion sounds like a lot of money, but when consider that there are individuals that could write a check for that amount, it’s not that much. Compared to the 150 billion in bonuses that Wall Street bankers take each year it’s really not much at all. Compared to the trillions in economic damage done by this grand conspiracy it’s just a rounding error.

Compared to the 4 million people who have lost their homes so far, do to the fraud of the Bush Crime Family, it works out to $6000 each. Enough to pay for a used car to live in, and really those people are only eligible for $1500 each, so it‘s just gas money for the “house.“ The rest goes to write-down mortgages, which means the money really goes to (wait for it) the banks.

Do you feel lucky punk? Well, do you? Willard Romney isn’t feeling lucky after finishing dead last in Tuesday’s voting. He’s hopping along on one foot as his ammo has largely been spent making himself dance. His one claim to credibility as a candidate was his business acumen. Yet in his expert opinion Detroit should have been allowed to fail ending car manufacturing in America forever.

The absolutely un-American thinking of billionaires and billionaire wannabes like Romney was made obvious to all by a Republican actor whose reputation rivals the sainted Reagan, except this one can act, and is intelligent.

A third of million new jobs were created in January according to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s household survey. This exceeds the quarter million job gain shown by the employer survey. Historically, these two surveys confirm one another except when unusual growth is seen. The household survey had been diverging from the employer survey by larger and larger numbers over the past year.

This divergence probably indicates exceptional growth in small business activity and among new entrepreneurs not adequately represented in the employer survey. This could be tied to the sharp growth in manufacturing jobs with 50,000 new workers added last month as reported by employers.