Today is the anniversary of the opening of the First Continental Congress in Carpenter’s Hall, Philadelphia, PA, in 1774. And here we are.

Welcome to August.

It’s Wednesday already? Hope you’re looking forward to a great weekend.

Here’re some of the more interesting news items I saw today. Please feel free to add others that caught your attention but that I may have missed.

Good evening! Here are some of the more interesting items gleaned today from the Internets, beginning with the Middle East.

Oh, those wascally wascals! Several members of the higher echelons in service to TPTB have stepped into some interesting piles of goo lately, so let’s start with them.

With the holiday coming up, we’ve asked one of our excellent commenters, fatster, to suggest stories and links for a morning post.  Our regular readers have been enjoying fatster’s contributions for a long time, so why not put them in a post?  So . . . here are fatsters hotlinks for today. Goldman Sachs might [...]