Joe Biden

• Crude prices fall towards $40 on global glut (Reuters)
• China Central Bank Injects Most Funds Since February as Money Rates Increase (BBG)
• Divided Fed Puts Yellen on Hot Seat (Hilsenrath)
• So Long September: Bond Traders Defer Their Date With the Fed (BBG)
• More Foods Boast Non-GMO Labels—Even Those Without GMO Varieties (WSJ)
• UN to let Iran inspect alleged nuke work site (AP)
• IAEA says access to Iran's Parchin military site meets demands (Reuters)
• Time to End Quarterly Reports, Law Firm Says (WSJ)

• China central bank tries to soothe global markets, says no reason for yuan to fall further (Reuters)
• Huge blasts at Chinese port kill 44, with hundreds injured (Reuters)
• China efforts to slow yuan fall hoist Europe shares, bond yields (Reuters)
• Greek Economy Unexpectedly Surged Before Capital Controls (BBG)
• Joe Biden Is Sounding Out Allies About a 2016 Bid (WSJ)
• U.K. Tries to Kick-Start Shale Gas With Planning Speedup (BBG)

With just hours to go until the first GOP Presidential candidate debate circus is unleashed, it appears the GOP is in full panic mode. With 10 hopefuls heading to their lecterns, only one stands out (in polls) and that, as The Hill reports, despite being snubbed by The Koch botthers, has Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus saying that Donald Trump is offering his party’s voters a breath of fresh air.

At 1000-to-1, Kim Kardashian is an outsider in the race to be the next US President but perhaps most notable in the odds that bookies are willing to offer is the 7th place that Donald Trump ranks (at 18-to-1 or just a 5% probability of winning), below GOP rivals such as Jeb Bush (23% probabiity) and Marco Rubio (11% probability). Trump even ranks below Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden according to where the money is being bet! Of course, Hillary remains the odds-on favorite at 10/11 (or 52% probability).

There's Always Been Some Corruption ... But Now Things Have Just Gotten Silly

... FIGHTING ISIS (Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine Confirm What Zero Hedge Has Been Saying)

To let the media tell it, recent "attacks" - including a suicide bombing that killed 32 people earlier this month - have prompted Turkey to officially join the fight against ISIS. In reality, Ankara's motivations can be explained not by a desire to rid the world of "terrorists", but by considerations of political expediency and by an autocrat's insatiable thirst for power.

As Turkey requests NATO support after launching strikes against both ISIS and PKK, question have arisen about Ankara's links to Islamic State and about the real aim of the country's "terror" crackdown.

"Erdogan is trying to achieve the result he failed to in the June 7 election in a political coup. That's the real aim of the steps taken now." "ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks."

Wherever government officials sense a credible threat to their power, they invariably take every opportunity to crush it by any means necessary: this is the first principle of how governments function, and every libertarian is all too familiar with it. this latest tragedy, you can be sure, will be used to accomplish the same anti-libertarian ends: the calls to investigate “hate groups,” and even to ban “hate speech,” are already being heard. Of course, who and what constitutes a “hate group,” and who is hating whom are subjective evaluations that no government official is qualified to make...

U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed ‘Trade’ deals are actually about whether the world is heading toward a dictatorial world government - a dictatorship by the hundred or so global super-rich who hold the controlling blocks of stock in the world’s largest international corporations - or else toward a democratic world government - which will be a global federation of free and independent states, much like the United States was at its founding, but global in extent. These are two opposite visions of world government; and Obama is clearly on the side of fascism, an international mega-corporate dictatorship... What’s at stake here is nothing less than whether the future of the United States, and perhaps even of the world, will be democracy, or else fascism.

Hillary Clinton actually supports Barack Obama’s trade-policy, and even supports the way in which he is trying to get it through Congress. However, the news-media didn’t report it that way. Hilary is repeating her earlier tactics, in 2008, when she tried to give the impression that she had opposed her husband Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, though in fact she had earlier bragged about how great it was for the country and claimed it as if it were her own.

Those men who wrote our Constitution made it perfectly intelligible to anyone who cared to read it. They also left some flexibility in its articles to ensure that as time passed and circumstances changed the document would remain viable as the indispensable protector of the republic they created and of the liberty of citizens. In recent decades, however, Americans have been treated to an endless stream of politicians, academics, lawyers, and pundits who describe the opaqueness of the Founder’s Constitution and the need for “experts” to decipher or infer what the document means. But their words are lies, there are no such things as universal values. There is only one value common to all men in all times and that is the universal lust for gaining and exercising arbitrary power, and that power is exactly what the Jacobin/Neocon crowd is after.

The revelation from an internal US intelligence document that the very US-led coalition supposedly fighting ‘Islamic State’ today, knowingly created ISIS in the first place, raises troubling questions about recent government efforts to justify the expansion of state anti-terror powers.

So much for the second Minsk ceasefire. A few hours ago, the US returned to its strategy of escalating Russian "costs" when it placed sanctions on eight Ukrainian separatists and a Russian bank, warning that recent attacks by rebels armed by Russia violated a European-brokered ceasefire in the war-torn country. The Russian response to the latest sanction pending, but the response may have been hinted at earlier today when an official from Russia's Foreign Ministery said the nation has the right to deploy nuclear arms in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. And finally, indicating that the semi-hot escalation between the US and Russia is close to getting out of control, Vice President Biden told Ukraine's president Wednesday the U.S. will send more aid to the country, which U.S. officials said will include small drones and armored Humvees.

In what could be a prelude to a Presidential run in 2016, on Friday Joe Biden released to the public both e-mails that he has written while serving as Vice-President for the past six years...