Charlie Pierce calls them "death funnels" and he's exactly right. He's referring to pipelines designed to transport Alberta Tar Sand, the dirtiest fuel on the planet, to refineries or ports to refineries that can turn it into technically more usable types of oil. It never gets very good, more the type you can lubricate heavy machinery with or burn in a particularly wasteful in the smoggy toxic sense power plant, barely better than coal.

It's basically asphalt, suitable for paving and not much else and it makes as much economic sense as tearing up roads or taking used tires to achieve the same effect, which is to say none at all in the current market where solar and wind are dirt cheap, batteries are getting less expensive by the hour, and fracked oil and natural gas are driving Saudi Arabia into bankruptcy. In fact the only way you don't operate at a loss simply from mining and refinery costs is if the price of crude is well over $70 a barrel. Which it isn't.

But Big Oil has all these sunk costs based on the notion of $100+ Oil and unlike a smart gambler it doesn't understand that the money you've put in the pot isn't yours anymore, it exists in a quantum state only determined at the reveal.

One of the most frustrating things this past week has been watching James Comey make the rounds of Stephanopoulos, Maddow, The View, along with other outlets and be lauded as some paragon of moral rectitude and virtue.

Jim Comey is a lifelong Republican who willingly and enthusiastically signed off on Torture (a War Crime in case you've forgotten) and who, immediately after his oh so so brave and principled stand at the bedside of John Ashcroft, personally approved a barely modified program of blanket electronic surveillance on United States Citizens THAT PERSISTS TO THIS DAY!

Thanks for nothing Barack.

(Not my freshest material, but still fun- ek)

I've been considering our current social and political condition and have arrived at the sad and reluctant conclusion that our Founding Fathers were all wrong about that "Declaration of Independence" thing.

Recent studies have shown that in terms of Median Household Income (the value separating the higher half of a sample from the lower half) the top 5 States are-

1. New Hampshire
2. Connecticut
3. Alaska
4. Maryland
5. Massachusetts

Hmm... that's a pretty strong New England core, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, #1, #2, and #5. If you take a look at the map I linked you'll see that some of our less fortunate neighbors are not so unfortunate either. New Jersey clocks in at #11, Rhode Island at #15, New York at #16, Pennsylvania at #18, and Vermont at #19.

That's a fair swath of territory but if we open our minds a little and add States like Maryland (#4), D.C. (#7 and it should be a State), and Virginia (#14) we might find some charity for our below median step children Delaware (#26) and Maine (#44).

We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.

Today is the anniversary of the United States Coast Guard (in Lego) but I'm not here to talk about that.

Instead I want to discuss heroism.

Admiral Paul F. Zukunft, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, has personally informed each of the 13 Transgendered (that we know of) members of his service that he will not enforce Trump's tweeted orders to dismiss them.

"I will not turn my back. We have made an investment in you and you have made an investment in the Coast Guard, and I will not break faith."

I'm reading a lot of reaction to the push back by Abortion Rights activists against the policy articulated by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Ben Ray Luján not to withhold financial support from anti-Choice candidates (which I wrote about Monday), most of it from Corporatist Institutional Democrats and their centrist sycophants.

Their argument goes something like this-

"Hey you Hippies, you said you wanted us to get serious about the 'economy stupid' so we made up this crappy slogan 'A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages, Papa John's' and slapped together some tepid and ineffectual 'reforms' that don't bother our Plutocrat paymasters much and to prove our sincerity we're abandoning all that 'Social Justice' stuff that pisses off the angry white male Trump voters.

Remember, we're the less evil ones."

Where to begin?

Marley was dead: to begin with.  There is no doubt whatever about that.  The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.  Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.  Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind!  I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail.  I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.  But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.  You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.