O. J. Simpson was in the news for some reason or other.

CORRECTION: That one spot on the planet did NOT reach 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide the previous week. Apparently this number is a little more “calculated knowledge” than I thought. No wonder the entire global ecosystem didn’t collapse yet!

Hundreds of women underwent double mastectomies. One of them was named Angelina.

The CDC discovered that over half of public swimming pools have fecal matter in them. Well, duh. You should see what’s in the ocean.

We learned that two months ago NASA spotted the brightest lunar meteor explosion ever recorded. NASA also broke its distance record for off-planet driving, although Curiosity still has about a mile to go to beat the socialists.

A tornado ripped through north central Texas and killed half a dozen people. Fortunately, however, tornado deaths this year are running well below the average of even recent years.

Abortion provider Kermit Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison for killing babies after delivering them alive in extremely unsanitary and dangerous conditions.

North Korea launched some short-range missiles into the sea, which news accounts say is actually “fairly routine” and “not uncommon.” So Kim is still wiling to talk big and waste weapons to keep South Korea and the US on their toes but still not yet willing to actually do anything stupid.

Things are getting worse in socialist Venezuela, what with rampant inflation, violent crime, and shortages of goods. I wonder if the recent plunge in US oil imports isn’t helping.

The federal government took a bigger scandalous beating last week. Apparently the IRS targeting of conservative groups was wider than previously thought, and even involved asking questions about what books people were reading and what kinds of prayers they were praying. Also the person in charge of that division is now in charge of the Obamacare division, which actually kinda justifies conservative fears about the IRS now being involved in healthcare, although on the other hand said person was appointed during Bush’s term, so how anti-conservative can she really be? Anyway, while all this was going on we also learned that the Department of Justice secretly subpoenaed two months of phone records from the Associated Press in response to a whistleblower leak that really did not threaten national security. Good times!

Now I’m very concerned about government overreach and invasion of privacy, but I’m not convinced the government has total surveillance (yet). Nevermind the assumption that the government is competent enough to either keep up with every new technology company and force them to comply without any of them ever spilling the beans, or advanced enough to sniff and decode all the wireless packets. My main evidence for this is the steady stream of overreaches involving the government trying to get information it didn’t have already!

The latest, of course, is the secret Department of Justice subpoena of Associated Press phone records from Verizon. We’ve also recently learned about the FBI reprogramming someone’s air card so they could track it. And Google and Twitter have started releasing the numbers of record requests they get from the US government, among others.

Certainly these are all troubling invasions of privacy, but the very fact that privacies had to be invaded in these ways suggests that the Total Invasion Of Privacies isn’t happening already.

Now some will say that the NSA stores it all but the other agencies don’t have access to it, or that they do but they can’t use it in court so they still have to look like they got it legally. But aren’t many of these secret subpoenas and warrantless tapping and so forth illegal anyway, and part of what makes them so controversial? Besides, if the government tracks everything but doesn’t tell anyone or use it, what’s the point? (Well, we would still be at risk for the Oops Cost.)

I wouldn’t put a whole lot of confidence in my position, and it’s probably prudent to assume that your digital communications are always being monitored. But I would love to hear a better explanation for what seems to be a big hole in that logic.

The scandals are dropping so fast now it’s getting hard to keep up. We have scandals tangential to other scandals (the IRS also accidentally grabbed millions of medical records?). We have scandals inside scandals (Holder recused himself with no written record of doing so?). We have minor scandals that are barely qualifying for airtime next to the major ones (The Army’s anti-sexual-harrassment official was accused of sexual assault just weeks after an Air Face anti-sexual-harrassment official was accused of the same thing? Obama admin is prosecuting Oil for killing bald eagles but not Wind?) When Jon Stewart skewers you two nights in a row for corruption and incompetency, you know this isn’t exactly a Fox News hullabaloo about Obama eating a falafel that was cooked by a guy who once allegedly complimented a terrorist’s turban.

Many are treating these revelations as some new, surprising thing. They’re certainly not new – My still-popular 218 Reasons list all sorts of abuses and questionable overreaches from Obama’s first term, from the NDAA, to drone strikes, to secret warrants and warrantless wiretapping, to federal raids, to blocking transparency, to prosecuting more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined, to suing states, to appointing excessive numbers of lobbyists and fundraisers, to… well, you get the point.

So I’m not really surprised by the latest ones, either. In fact, I view them as inevitable. Part of my worldview is that people are imperfect. That is why we have always had corrupt politicians, and it’s why the more power they have, the more incompetence and corruption we will see, and the more costly this can be. That’s also why it’s important for conservatives to resist the temptation to pigeonhole this as an Obama thing – it’s a generic big government thing that is extremely likely to afflict every administration these days. Scandals are almost a sort of natural “market correction” to a government that grows too big, too ambitious, too arrogant.

The only thing that’s new or surprising is that the scandals are actually becoming front-page headline news for awhile. My cynical side thinks its convenient that it’s happening after Obama’s reelection, though it’s possible some of these are worse than before or that key revelations didn’t come out until now.

But the correct response to the abuse of a big government is not to simply fire some people and hope their replacements are better. The correct response is to limit the power that made abuses possible in the first place. Fortunately, there’s a decent chance we may get something like that for the freedom of press. Though I’m not going to hold my breath about the tax code.

St. Louis fast food workers are calling for a wage of $15 an hour. Missouri’s minimum wage is $7.35 an hour…

When asked how the wage increase would affect consumers buying lunch Rafana asked, “Would you mind paying 25 cents more for your number two so that somebody can have a fare wage and be able to take care of their family?”

The local paper stoked the class warfare fires with its write-up:

Nobody seriously thought the industry would bow to moral suasion and start paying a living wage… If McDonald’s did that, it might not have been able to triple its CEO’s pay package to $13.8 million last year.

Now I support the right of workers to voluntarily negotiate better higher wages or better working conditions with their employers. But any discussions that ignore economic and mathematical realities don’t have any chance at improving that reality. So let’s look at some numbers.

Can You Double Wages At The Bottom By Paying Less At The Top?

We’ve all heard how inequality is growing, how the rich are getting richer, how the top 1% or whatever have nabbed 93% or whatever of the economic growth in the last five years or whatever. Here, we see claims that McDonald’s CEO’s pay was tripled. Yet the starting crew’s pay was not. How unfair!

Well, hold on a minute. Wikipedia says McDonald’s has about 1.8 million employees. If you fired him and split his entire pay package among every employee, they could get paid an extra $7.63….. per year. The decision to triple the CEO’s pay may be bad signaling, without getting into how much he “deserved” it, but it doesn’t imply that McDonald’s has enough money to double everyone’s pay.

To do that, we have to look at overall profits.

Can You Double Wages At The Bottom By Reducing Profits?

McDonald’s annual report is complex, especially because it looks like they have more data on company-operated stores than franchise stores, and it’s possible I’m reading some of this wrong. But it looks like “payroll and employee benefits” were $4.7 billion last year for company-operated stores, and if we assume a similar proportion for franchise from their sales, that gives a total labor cost of about $7 billion.

So let’s say we want to double that and increase McDonald’s labor costs by $7 billion. Their total profit last year before taxes was $8.1 billion. Now I’m assuming this includes payroll taxes (I don’t see a line item anywhere else) and that those taxes are not progressive, but I’m also assuming we’re not doubling benefits and maybe not even doubling pay for those in the middle and higher management tiers.

Wow. It looks like McDonald’s actually could double everyone’s wages from its existing profit margins. I honestly did not expect that to be mathematically possible, but it looks like it is, at least in theory.

Of course, that would reduce profit margins from around 20% to 3%, which would probably send the stock price plummeting. Now I know it’s trendy for liberals to scoff at high profit margins and paying investors and all that, especially at the expense of “living wages” for workers, and I admit it does look a little unnecessary.

But I think it’s a little more complicated than that. If you only have profit margins of a couple percent and/or no money from investors, you are an extremely vulnerable company. Minor fluctuations in supplier pricing could tip you into the red. It’s harder to expand or upgrade restaurants. It’s harder to handle debts (while I didn’t read the report closely enough to understand it all, it sounds like McDonald’s has debts).

All of these things make it harder for McDonald’s to hire employees and keep them around. So while McDonald’s might mathematically be able to double wages today, it might mean there’s a much higher risk of firing a lot of those people tomorrow. And I don’t think that’s quite what the living wage folks have in mind.

Can You Double Wages At The Bottom By Increasing Prices?

There’s an obvious way to keep profit margins at healthy enough levels to ensure the long-term stability of a company (and the jobs that come with it). Just increase prices. Some of the folks above seem to think that “paying 25 cents more for your number two” is enough to double wages and keep the company sustainable.

That would increase revenue about 5% and bring the margins back up to about 8% (although by now the assumed calculations are starting to pile up so please increase the size of your grain of salt and double-check my work). That’s better, though I’ve never run a business and I don’t know if that’s enough for sustainability. You could always add another quarter, but now you’re starting to hit another limitation – customer demand.

If you increase prices too much, more customers will go to another fast food restaurant, and you’ll have to get by with fewer employees. If all the fast food restaurants increase their wages and prices, more customers will go to nicer restaurants or buy their own groceries (which would actually probably be better for their health). Etc, etc.

This is why I definitely don’t support mandated attempts to regulate these wages. There are too many ways forced distortions in the market can backfire and destroy the very jobs you were trying to improve.

So How Do You Double Your Wages If You’re At The Bottom?

But if mandated wage increases are off the table, and voluntary negotiations don’t work, what’s left? What do you do to make more money if you’re stuck at the bottom tier of a fast-food restaurant?

Simple. Get out of the bottom tier.

Restaurants like McDonald’s have such ridiculously high turnover that pretty much anybody can become a manager if they want to – that’s one way to get higher pay. Or you can get work experience there and take it to a better restaurant with better pay. Those are some options available to almost anyone without even leaving the restaurant industry.

I know, I know, liberals can come up with all sorts of reasons those options aren’t available to certain people in certain circumstances and blah blah blah. But in my opinion, those options provide more opportunities to more people than mandated wage increases actually would.

Low-wage jobs are only supposed to be worked by teenagers who need experience more than they need a “living wage” at that point in their lives. Remember, you can’t make all jobs pay a living wage; you can only eliminate all jobs that are worth less than a living wage. Is it fair to deprive teenagers of the chance to work such a job? Unfortunately, adults with few opportunities will always compete for those jobs, too. But is it fair to tell them they can’t?

So in my opinion, if you want to help folks stuck in low-wage jobs, don’t tell them you’ll work to double their wages while putting some of them out of work. Instead, help them find more opportunities. That’s a more sustainable path for both current and future generations.

One of the places on earth that measures carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere measured it at 400 parts per million for the first time, which caused a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth because of how having a 4 instead of a 3 in the first digit symbolizes how doomed we all are because the last time this happened (according to calculated knowledge) was millions of years ago when temperatures were a lot higher than this which somehow does not disprove the very strong link between carbon dioxide and temperature which is the reason we are all doomed.

A new study says parents who lick their baby’s pacifiers make them less likely to developer allergies. I think we’ll take our chances.

Stephen Colbert’s Democrat sister lost to ex-adulterous Republican Mark Sanford in a strongly conservative South Carolina district to replace appointed African American Republican Senator Tim Scott. So unusual and yet so typical.

Metalcore band As I Lay Dying’s frontman Tim Lambesis was arrested for allegedly conspiring to have a hit man murder his wife. This is so sad on so many levels and I’m still in denial hoping it’s somehow not true.

The world’s first gun made with 3D printer technology has been successfully fired in the US. This is not to be confused with last year’s “first successful firing of a 3D-printed gun,” which only included the “lower receiver.” This new gun had everything printed but the “firing pin,” so once they get that printed next year we’ll have a third headline about the “first gun” made on “3D printers.”

People were arrested in Europe in connection with the crazy diamond heist from Week #33, suggesting that crime still doesn’t (usually) pay. Meanwhile, this week’s mega scheme involved thieves nabbing $45 million from thousands of ATM’s around the world in a few hours.

The IRS admitted that it targeted conservative Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny over their tax-exempt status. This is an example of what I’ve called the “political warfare cost” (thought I need a catchier name) of big government, where laws become complicated enough that almost everybody is probably breaking some of them which enables the people in power to selectively target their political enemies.

The Senate passed the complicated Internet sales tax, where it now goes to (hopefully die?) in the House. Meanwhile, House technophiles introduced a (probably very good) bill to protect consumers who buy technological devices. Back in the Senate, John McCain introduced a good-hearted but probably harmful bill to mandate the unbundling of cable channels. And Elizabeth Warren introduced a good-hearted but very dumb bill to make student loans really cheap.

Congress also held hearings on Benghazi. Democrats say Republicans are just trying to make Hillary look bad for 2016. Republicans want to know why the administration changed their talking points and said they didn’t. I’m stopped being too sympathetic about the conservative witch hunt after learning that Bush had more consulate attacks under his watch or something, but there are still some interesting unanswered questions here.

A Cleveland man helped rescue three woman who had been kidnapped as teenagers and held captive for a decade. And since this happened in 2013, Charles Ramsey was interviewed and became more famous for the auto-tuned remix.

North Korea removed missiles from a launch site, de-pending some of the “impending doom” of the last few weeks.

Pakistan had a mostly successful democratic election.

The Bangladesh garment factory collapse death toll is now over one thousand. That’s gotta make even the most hardcore libertarian at least a tiny bit more interested in the working conditions that produce the clothes he buys.

Saudi Arabia’s coronavirus spread to France and may have transmitted human-to-human! That’s almost scary enough for the media to start acting really freaked out!

When conservatives were trying to pass the anti-illegal-immigration bill in Arizona, they focused on how bad illegal immigration was in that state. Liberal opponents focused on how bad the bill was. When liberals were trying to pass Obamacare, they focused on how bad healthcare was in this country. Conservative opponents focused on how bad the bill was.

This dynamic not only affects party lines in both directions, but also issues that transcend them. In the current debate over Internet sales tax, which pits online businesses against brick & mortar businesses and has a lot of Republicans on both sides, supporters focus on how unfair the current tax structure is. Opponents focus on how this particular bill is not that good of a solution.

In summary, when a potentially bad legislation is being offered to a legitimate problem, supporters talk about how badly we need a solution to the status quo while opponents talk about how the bill in question won’t actually solve the problem. As a result, they often end up talking past each other, whether on the floor of the Senate or in the comments section of every website, saying the same things over and over again and getting nowhere.

Supporters often accuse their opponents of not caring about the problem. You don’t support the Help the Children Bill? Don’t you think children need help? Why do you hate the children? Then they just repeat all the statistics about the terribleness of the status quo. There are 765,405 children in this country without any access to an ice cream truck! 53% of them have never even heard an ice cream truck jingle!! If we can just give ice cream to one life… Opponents tend to ignore all that and reiterate their opposition. This bill will add burdensome regulations to small businesses. Some businesses can’t afford to maintain an ice cream truck in their parking lot 24 hours a day. This is just an attempt to give the Ice Cream Advisory Board more power to regulate our lives! And then the supporters say, Why do you care about businesses more than the chillllllllllllldrennnnn?????

So how do we solve these repetitive exercises in futility? Well, if you support a bad bill because you don’t like the status quo, you need to stop. Some bills that have the intention of solving a problem may not actually create the incentives to solve that problem (in fact, from my bias, it’s probably a majority of bills), and if you really care about solving the problem you don’t want a bill that doesn’t solve the problem.

More importantly, if you oppose a bad bill, don’t forget to reiterate how much you care about the problem (assuming you actually do care, of course). A little bit of signaling can go a long way. If the supporter is just repeating talking points about the status quo without connecting how this bill will solve the problem (see the last five months of gun control debate), just take a little time to quote all the statistics back to them to show how much you all agree about the problem, and then explain how the particular bill won’t actually help.

Then you will easily convince them that the bill is bad, and then it won’t pass, and then everyone will be happy. The End.

I think there was some kind of horse race.

Area Man Loses Life Savings On Carnival Game, Wins Stuffed Banana. Um… not to expose my cushy middle-class status, but since when did $2,600 count as “life savings”?

Scientists have engineered a glow-in-the-dark sheep. Um… cool, I think?

The first “active” “male” “player” of a “major” “professional” “sports” “team” revealed that his sexual preferences are different from the sexual preferences of all the other active male players of major professional sports teams who have revealed their sexual preferences.

Are We Living In The Future? Robot Finds Mysterious Spheres in Ancient Temple. I wonder if we’re on the cusp of a golden age of archaeology as technology advancements with robots/drones/etc allow us to delve much farther into places that used to require human-sized openings (or Titanic-sized budgets).

Wildfires in southern California threatened lots of homes but it sounds like there hasn’t been too much damage and firefighters are getting things under control.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo’s rocket test flight was a success, putting the company that much closer to space tourism.

North Korea claims to have sentenced a detained US citizen to 15 years of hard labor. Can they do that? It says he is a Christian and I know there are Christians working to help North Koreans escape; I wonder if he was involved in that.

“Violence in the Middle East” got more confusing. Israel fired on Syria to destroy weapons that were going from Iran to Lebanon. Something like that. Though apparently this isn’t the first time. Meanwhile, Syrian’s government and rebels are still fighting each other.

The bird flu in China seems to be easing, but the coronavirus in Saudi Arabia is getting a wee bit scarier.

In other words, we have more oil under the ground and more oil above the ground than ever even as we’re needing to use less of it than ever, making an energy shortage less and less likely as we slowly transition away from fossil fuels.

77. Another nugget of good news on the online patents & innovation front: A judge has thrown out Craigslist’s attempt to sue a competitor for using their submissions to make a better website.

78. Google is innovating in the fast-growing continent of Africa with a payment card called BebaPay (h/t @justinwolfers).

79. Just a few months after introducing 3d printers in their stores for printing, Staples announced they will start selling them as well. Looks like the devices are continuing to follow the personal computer’s path to widespread use.

80. Scientists are making progress on a cure for leukemia.

As always, Expected Optimism has a few more good reasons.

Thanks to a Supreme Court case involving mail-order catalogs in 1992, businesses do not have to charge sales tax to customers who live in other states. There are two “unfairnesses” of this status quo that supporters of the Marketplace Fairness Act hope to correct.

The Status Quo

The first is the tax code being tilted in favor of online businesses. Customers often check out goods in local stores and then buy them online with no sales tax; this “showrooming” is arguably unfair and unsustainable, like a variant of the free rider problem.

The second is the loss of state tax revenue when customers act on this tilted tax code; if a state is taxing goods to fund its budget, there’s no obvious reason why the method of purchase should allow people in the state to opt out. (Indeed, many states require customers to report their missing sales tax every year, but it’s an unenforceable provision many people don’t even know about.)

This Bill

This particular bill gets local governments their revenue, but it doesn’t so much “level the playing field” for businesses as tilt it the other way. The bill requires all online merchants above a threshold to charge each customer’s local sales tax rate and pay it to each local government – over 9,600 jurisdictions by some counts. The bill simplifies things by requiring each state to be a sort of middleman, providing software for determining rates and single points for tax filing. But I’m not convinced it will be that simple.

Tax rates can vary within zip codes due to TIFs or “tourist districts” or whatever other creative ways local municipalities come up with to extract revenue from their citizens or entice businesses to move in. This means you cannot simply fill a database table of zip codes and rates and update it once a quarter; I think you’re going to need to query the exact rate for every individual customer’s address. With fifty different systems, there’s a good chance one of them will be slow or down sometimes, hurting your ability to serve customers.

How is this a level playing field? Physical retailers do not have to take the address of every customer and compute each individual tax rate; they simply charge their location’s rate to everyone. Is it even right to subject businesses to local governments all over the country?

Many supporters assume technology will automate the tax rate calculation; maybe it will. But they often ignore the issue of filing those taxes, and we’re all reminded every April that the government hasn’t done much automating on that side. Megan McArdle notes that businesses may have to file taxes 40+ times every month. And the $1 million threshold does not exempt as many “small businesses” as supporters claim; that’s not a difficult level to reach in revenue for an online business with small enough profit margins that it’s hard to afford three extra accountants to do all this new tax filing.

A Third Way?

If neither the status quo nor the proposed solution is “fair,” what about a Third Way? Wouldn’t it be simpler and fairer to just have each online business charge its local rate to all customers, just like physical retailers?

Local governments would still lose revenue when their citizens bought iPods on eBay instead of at Walmart. Of course, another local government would be gaining revenue, and it might be a wash except that it might encourage more businesses to move to states with no sales tax, where we would still have the status quo.

In theory, this might encourage states to lower their sales taxes, but the status quo doesn’t seem to be encouraging that too much. Besides, states might only replace it with other taxes, and I’m not sure we want to strongly favor property taxes over consumption taxes. The current bill might encourage locales to raise sales taxes because they would have less competition with lower-tax locales farther away (though they would still be competing to keep their citizens).

Nothing Is Fair

Perhaps the issue is that large numbers of people are now easily able to purchase things across geographical lines, and this means there is no totally fair way to tax based on geographical lines! Somebody is going to be getting “special treatment” no matter what.

Either online businesses get the benefit of not charging sales tax to customers in other districts, or physical businesses get the benefit of not collecting different sales taxes for customers in other districts and paying those taxes to other districts. Either businesses suffer “taxation without representation,” or customers suffer “taxation without representation,” depending on a meaningless distinction about who “really” pays the tax. (I’m not sure if the bill affects catalog businesses, who represent a small enough share of the economy that they might still get away with sales-tax-less special treatment. Surely they wouldn’t get the anti-treatment of requiring customers to accurately calculate how much sales tax to include on their mailed checks!)

If there’s no way to eliminate special treatment, we could try to pick the unfair option that is the least unfair option. Supporters of the Marketplace Fairness Act may believe this bill to be that option, although I’m not convinced it is that easy to order them by fairness.

We could also try to pick the unfair option that is the least infringing on individual freedoms. This would clearly not be the Marketplace Fairness Act, which adds a myriad of accounting regulations to businesses and opens them up to potential auditing from outside jurisdictions.

Finally, we could try to pick the unfair option that creates the best economic incentives for growth or good government policy or whatever our biases prefer. Between the two least-infringing options, I think the Third Way is at least better than the status quo, as it forces jurisdictions to compete more for businesses to get their sales tax revenue. (Of course, maybe local governments would just create more complex webs of special-treatment tax credit schemes to lure businesses into their districts instead of lowering the sales tax rate for the whole zip code.) The Third Way would at least help with the level playing field and lost revenue problems without complicating life and freedoms for small businesses, and I think I like the simplicity of literally giving all businesses, physical and otherwise, the same taxing rules.

Ultimately there are no easy answers. I should also probably note that I’m biased against the bill because it would affect my work. But I do think the Third Way is superior to both the bill and the status quo, and I’m hoping it will be amended in that direction before becoming law. I have made my congressional representatives aware of this, and maybe you should too.

Reese Witherspoon was arrested for something or other.

Some country guy who was “before my time” named George Jones died.

CISPA died in the Senate because they were too busy trying to pass an Internet sales tax bill.

Apparently the Elvis impersonator actually didn’t send ricin to Washington D.C., and the feds have dropped charges on him and arrested another guy. Good thing our drone assassins don’t make those kinds of mistakes!

SpaceX isn’t the only company working on rocket launches to send stuff to the International Space Station (and beyond?). Orbital Sciences had a successful test flight which also launched some smartphones into orbit for some NASA testing. Meanwhile, SpaceX test launched their reusable Grasshopper vehicle to a new record height of 80m.

Thirteen female corrections officers at a Maryland prison were indicted for helping a gang leader run CRAZY AMOUNTS OF ILLEGAL OPERATIONS from behind bars while he got FOUR OF THEM PREGNANT. Conservatives blamed society’s ignorance of traditional gender roles for having female guards, allowing the male prisoners to prey on the insecure ones, and I’m not sure they don’t have some kind of point here.

The FAA actually started cutting air traffic controller hours due to the Sequester which led to flight delays which led to annoyed journalists and Congressmen and other flying people. People on the Internet claimed that even after the Sequester the FAA’s budget was still larger than they originally requested and that it only cut them back to 2010 levels and that flying is down like 8% or something these days anyway and that a lot of airports don’t even have air traffic controllers and they don’t have any problems so it was all a big whiney pity party from the Obama administration but Congress quickly passed a fix that explicitly gave the FAA “flexibility” to implement Sequester cuts without cutting air traffic controllers so now none of it really matters except people can complain that rich people got their Sequester pain taken care of while poor people that got their programs cut are still out of luck.

A building collapsed in Bangladesh and killed a few hundred people. Libertarians, sometimes this is how regulations get stricter.

The United States sent more “nonlethal” aid to the rebels in Syria, where the civil war is still dragging on with no clear resolution. There also may be evidence that Syria’s government used chemical weapons against the rebels, which might be crossing a “red line” that means the US will “do something” about it. War hawks in Congress (a.k.a. John McCain) want Obama to send weapons or troops or something to the rebels. Good thing that kind of Middle East intervention has never come back to bite us in the past!