2011 has started off to be a new reporters dream, as one major story after another has moved through the news cycle. It began with a promising young congresswoman and her entourage gunned down in a small shopping mall, then moved quickly to the historic "Arab Spring," with uprisings and demonstrations in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain Syria and even Saudi Arabia. The millions of long oppressed people there were finally demanding more from their governments, and pressing for democracy and free expression. One autocratic government after another fell, the most significant being Egypt, and the Sheiks of the House of Saud trembled in their sleep, more and more uneasy with each passing week.
Then, right in the Middle of the Western effort to roust Colonel Gaddafi out of power in Libya with GBU bunker busters, a 9.0 mega quake complete with massive tsunami strikes Japan and sweeps whole communities away like tinker toys. The true disaster of that event was difficult to measure on any scale of misery, with four nuclear power plants in various stages of meltdown and a cloud of radiation blowing in to America from across the wide Pacific.
The Royal wedding gave us a commercial break of feel good happiness, but before the echo of the church bells faded we get this ominous message that the president was to address the nation on a quiet Sunday night in May, "on a matter concerning national security." There hasn't been something this dramatic since Roosevelt addressed the nation after Pearl Harbor.The message? We finally got Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the Midwest and Southeast are ravaged by tornadoes and the mighty Mississippi is flooding with all the rainfall. That's a lot of real estate for "team coverage."
All these stories have played out on a background of slow, grinding inflation in key areas like commodities, food, and gasoline, while the value of the dollar plummeted to near all time lows. Meanwhile, the manipulated stock market continued to staircase up and up, oblivious to the realities of what has been happening. Auto plants and suppliers shutting down all over Japan and the US? Not to worry, up 60 points today. Gasoline at $4.29 a gallon in California (on up to $4.49)--too bad, up 40 points again. Double dip housing bust? Better push it up 100 points today. Silver and gold in a massive sell off after five margin calls? Just a rich man's game--up 50 points please. The market has been impervious to all the bad news!
Yet, even as I write, the Fed's rampant buying of treasury bonds, called "quantitative easing" today but "monetizing the debt" in other times, is slowly fading. The Fed's balance sheet has ballooned up like a puffer fish about to explode. Economists wonder who will buy the next round of bonds, with Japan prostrate and China ever more surly and irascible when it comes to funding our massive debt. Uncle Sam's credit rating now looks as bad ad that of most of the American Middle Class.
And the Internet? It continues to buzz with rumors of a Comet "Elenin" that is actually a brown dwarf star they call "Nibiru," slowly entering the inner solar system like a harbinger of doom. Some say that the comet's name really translates as E.L.E. Nin (Extinction Level Event "Nin," a word associated with an ancient Sumerian Goddess.) There is even a backlash against almighty Google, where doomsayers claim evidence of Nibiru has been systematically deleted from NASA and other internet databases, and this has spawned rebel search engine sites like "Gibiru" that purport to present the REAL story about Elenin and our impending doom. Check it out here. (Gotta love the Internet, eh?)
Yes, it has been a year of momentous news, but something tells me that we will have more stories to keep the news teams as fleet footed as ever. After all, it's only May, a news cycle month where we usually get a major story that dominates the airwaves for at least two months. Last year it was BP and the death of the Gulf of Mexico and the underwater volcano there that never blew. The year before it was the dread emergence of the "swine flu," and the world-wide pandemic that never happened. What will we get this year before Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer driving season? Was Osama's demise just the teaser to be followed in short order by Al Qaeda's revenge--coming soon to a theater near you?
Time to break out that copy of "2012" and fire up some popcorn. Something tells me there will be another major story along in short order.
