On CSPAN Washington Journal this A.M., not one but TWO different callers accused Obama and his crowd for a conspiracy to create the current Wall Street mess just prior to the election.

I'm NOT making this shit up.

I love the smell of roast chicken in the morning!

The Leftist unions refuse to cave into their ultimatum.

The palace is surrounded by hostile demonstrators.

Anybody gotta dream?

Hell, Air France had a better offer and was ready to shoulder all the debts.

The lovefest for Berlusconi continues. He is now at a 60% approval rating.

And Alitalia is failing now?  Sure would be nice if we could just let our idiot airlines fail and bring the European ones in to do it properly.

Anyway, so I've stated probably about twenty thousand times in the last few years that the idea of economists being a group of libertarian and conservative looney toons was a load of shit, pointing out that guys like Krugman and Stiglitz were more representative of the field (being its two biggest guns) than the Kudlows and Cramers of the world.  Still, the straw men are lined up.

A new poll backs me up.  Economists -- real ones, not the DC smut-peddlers and industry hacks on CNBC and in the WSJ -- favor Obama over McCain by a Yurpian-like margin, 59% to 31%.

I'm shocked.  Shocked, I tell you.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

The hacked Yahoo account was one of two Ms Palin owned

Anonymous hackers have gained access to the personal e-mail account of US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Those behind the hack put screenshots of messages in Ms Palin's Yahoo inbox on the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks.

McCain Says He Would Fire SEC's Cox If President (Update1)

By Hans Nichols and Catherine Dodge
Enlarge Image/Details

Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Republican presidential nominee John McCain said he would fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox if he were president.

``The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president and in my view has betrayed the public's trust,'' McCain said at a rally in Iowa. ``If I were president today, I would fire him.''

SEC spokesman John Nester declined to comment. President George W. Bush's spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said in response that Cox ``has the president's confidence.''

-Skip-

The SEC ``kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino,'' the Arizona senator, 72, said. ``We cannot wait any longer for more failures in our financial system.''

McCain also used the speech to attack his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, saying he hasn't taken a firm position on the takeover of AIG and that he and congressional Democrats haven't got a plan to prevent a future crisis.

Placing Blame

Obama has said the crisis stems from the Bush administration's failure to oversee markets and argued that McCain, who has supported deregulation in the past, would continue those policies.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, called the Republican candidate's statement, ``very typical McCain-style politics, go after the first person you can to divert attention.''

Cox, 55, has presided over the SEC, Wall Street's main regulator, since August 2005. A former U.S. representative from California, his nomination by Bush was confirmed by the Senate by unanimous consent.

One day to the meetup!

Indeed! And it looks like we will have great weather.

Paris Prévisions météo de Météo-France - Météo locale:
Firday:    Sun, 8°C / 18°C, wind 10 km/h
Saturday: Sun, 8°C / 20°C, wind 10 km/h       
Sunday: Sun, 9°C / 18°C , wind 20 km/h

^{The current financial crisis is claiming an increasing number of victims, not just in the US but in western Europe too. In Amsterdam, the Dutch-Belgian financial services group Fortis is being hardest hit. What can the financial services watchdog do about it?}

By Heleen de Graaf and Philip de Witt Wijnen, NTC Handelsblad

Has the Dutch finance minister Wouter Bos or central bank president Nout Wellink already rung ING boss Michel Tilmant and Rabobank CEO Bert Heemskerk to ask, "what shall we do with Fortis?"...

The situation at Fortis resembles that of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and HBOS. Certain stock market players - read hedge funds which can profit from a continued decline in prices - spread rumours that a bank has a solvency problem.

Whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Because, in the current jittery market such a rumour is enough to spark a wave of selling. The declining share price pressures the bank in question and prompts other banks to withdraw their loans to it. Anxious customers may decide to withdraw their funds too. As a result, the bank has a solvency problem. The process is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

On Tuesday, Fortis categorically denied rumours that it was considering a new emission. "There are no new developments," it said in a statement. Fortis plans to give more details about its position in the coming days. Nevertheless, its share price continued to plummet.

Wow. I really thought that John McCain's Spain gaffe was just that, a gaffe, wherein he somehow got confused about what was happening and didn't understand that the question about holding a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero was a question about Spain and Europe rather than rogue leaders from Latin America. Certainly that strikes me as the fairest reading of the audio. Here's the relevant portion, in English:

But now along comes Randy Scheueneman with an official campaign statement saying that it wasn't a gaffe, that McCain was articulating an actual "no meetings with Spain" policy:

The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain's willingness to meet Zapatero (and id'd him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview.

That's an insane policy. Recall that under the North Atlantic Treaty, the United States is actually obligated to go to war on behalf of Spanish territorial integrity and vice versa.

made me want to listen to this again...

Ad astra per aspera

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (CNN) - Sarah Palin likes to tell voters around the country about how she "put the government checkbook online" in Alaska. On Thursday, Palin suggested she would take that same proposal to Washington.

"We're going to do a few new things also," she said at a rally in Cedar Rapids. "For instance, as Alaska's governor, I put the government's checkbook online so that people can see where their money's going. We'll bring that kind of transparency, that responsibility, and accountability back. We're going to bring that back to D.C."

There's just one problem with proposing to put the federal checkbook online - somebody's already done it. His name is Barack Obama.

Oops.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

Short-selling of financial stocks is to be banned in the United Kingdom from midnight on Thursday night under rules drawn up by the Financial Services Authority.

Hopes of finding a buyer for Washington Mutual dimmed on Thursday as an auction for the beleaguered US bank had yet to attract any bids.

...

Goldman Sachs is conducting the auction for Seattle-based WaMu, which is the sixth largest US bank, with $310bn (€215bn, £170bn) in assets and more than $140bn in deposits.

Goldman has approached a number of banks, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, according to people close to the situation.