Last week there was a large spike in unemployment claims and it was proclaimed that OBAMA CAUSES THE END OF THE WORLD by the right leaning corporate media. This week the number is down by even more and they are calling that an "unexplained aberration". The five week moving average continues coming down (that's a good thing).
Weekly numbers often need to be corrected later because of delays in the states' reporting data. If there was a holiday that week you can count on it.
Mittens has been making much noise about Obama's foreign policy blunders. You know, like apologizing for America, except that never happened. Now we need to apologize to one of our allies for "some guy" (as described by the Mayor of London) who dug a huge PR hole, but he did find $2 million in campaign contributions down at Barclay's Bank.
The conservative British papers are running headlines like "Mitt the Twit", and that is the mildest comment they're making about him. What happens when Willard confronts China as he's promised to do? They aren't so easy going about being insulted the way our closest ally is. They don't have an "Anglo-Saxon heritage" in common with us, as if we did with Britain.
The massive thunderstorms that we've been having are so powerful that they're blasting holes through the ozone layer. Water vapor is being lifted in excess of 60,000 feet (something not thought possible), and the interaction with the pollution laced moisture is destroying ozone at a rate 100 times faster than it can be replenished. Researchers don't know yet how widespread the phenomena has become.
A new unofficial weather term has been created, the "heat dome". This is a phenomenon where a stable high altitude, high pressure, cloudless system presses down on the dry air beneath it trapping heat. It appears that a series of heat domes are responsible for the unprecedented melting of Greenland ice mass, nearly the entire surface has warmed above freezing in early summer.
Normally this doesn't happen until the end of summer and doesn't last very long. This year it has happened so early that even ice at high altitude is melting. This event doesn't mean anything in itself, it happens about every 150 years, but we are experiencing such rare weather events on a daily basis.
The British chose to honor their National Health Service as a major part of the Olympic opening ceremony. The NBC anchor did take note of the fact that the American audience wouldn't understand this, but other than alluding to the controversy about our health care system he didn't really explain it.
A billion people were watching the TV coverage, the Americans would be the only people that needed to have it explained. Of course we will probably win more medals than any other country, well except maybe for Red China, and they're building their own national health service, and bullet trains, and a manned space program....
Mitt Romney says this is going to be the "American Century" after all. That is it will be under his watch. He's says he will bring back all the Neo-cons from the Bush Administration to make it happen. The same Neo-cons fired by Robert Gates when Pappy Bush sent him in to fill in the giant hole that W dug himself. A safer bet would be to learn Mandarin.