The Reticulator

Let’s see. The last time the stock market had a good day was in response to the defeat of the Big Bailout. I wonder how it would respond if it would get rescinded. It would be worth a try, don’t you think?

Here’s another idea to restore confidence in the economy. Both presidential candidates and their VPs should withdraw from the election on the grounds of general cluelessness and lack of seriousness, as demonstrated by their stances on the Bailout. Let the two party conventions reconvene and choose someone else.

You might argue that there is not enough time, that the news media couldn’t possibly vet the candidates before election day. Well, if you look at the rate of investigation into candidate Obama, you would be right. But they’ve shown what they can do in the case of Sarah Palin. So maybe there still is enough time.

I get the impression from the comments posted to this article by Julie Burchill that The Guardian has a lot of readers who don’t like Christianity. Great fun to read them. The article itself was OK, too:

I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body; but what I am, is religious.

and

Once, of course, I was a teenage atheist;

and

…there is something profoundly immature about atheists. That surly, self-satisfied certainty…

H/t to Arts & Letters Daily

I had to laugh when we saw this billboard at a stoplight between I-80 and US-20 near Bristol, Indiana. The billboard also said something about Crossroads Community search Church. I see that some bloggers have picked up on it already.

Here’s a keeper discussion (Atlantic Monthly, Matt Yglesias, ht to PostModern Conservative) on the great value provided by all these blogs written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Article title: “Does this blog suck? Do all blogs suck?“

James Kirchick of the New Republic writes in The Weekly Standard about “The Democrats’ Popularity Fetish.” He rightly points out that Obama’s cavalier attitude towards free trade and towards meeting with dictators is hardly going to make America popular outside our country.

But he closes by questioning whether we should be all that concerned about “global opinion.”

Conservatives have long liked to sneer at global opinion, and it’s true that popularity shouldn’t be our first priority. They don’t really need encouragement in that attitude by Kirchick.

But I say we should care about others’ opinions. GWB would have done well to at least respect it. If Stalin cared enough about world opinion to hide his crimes from view, shouldn’t we care about it, too?

But it’s interesting that the same Democrats who lecture us about how we need to take foreign opinion into account have a remarkably insular view of the economy.

Example:

Here is a press release from Nancy Pelosi in September 2003, complaining that Bush missed a chance to get a United Nations mandate re Iraq.

And here is the same Nancy Pelosi in her blog, talking as though the universe ends at the U.S. border. She blames high oil prices on “two oilmen in the White House.”

HT to Ann Coulter who hit a bullseye:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or as she is called on the Big Dogs blog, “the worst speaker in the history of Congress,” explained the cause of high oil prices back in 2006: “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.”

Yes, that would explain why the price of oral sex, cigars and Hustler magazine skyrocketed during the Clinton years. Also, I note that Speaker Pelosi is a hotelier … and the price of a hotel room in New York is $1,000 a night! I think she might be onto something.

Is that why a barrel of oil costs mere pennies in all those other countries in the world that are not run by “oilmen”? Wait — it doesn’t cost pennies to them? That’s weird.