He's a Lightworker, for crying out loud, not an economics guru.

U.S. stocks slid, sending the market to its biggest two-day slump since 1987, after jobless claims jumped and the shrinking economy crushed earnings at companies from Blackstone Group Inc. to News Corp.

...

``We're a long way from the end of the economic challenges,'' said Mike Morcos, who helps manage $1 billion at Old Second Wealth Management in Aurora, Illinois. ``Earnings next year are going to be significantly lower and estimates are going to continue to come down.''

The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 5 percent to 904.88, extending its two-day loss to 10 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average retreated 443.48 points, or 4.9 percent, to 8,695.79. The Russell 2000 Index of small U.S. companies declined 3.7 percent to 495.84. The MSCI World Index of 23 developed markets lost 5.9 percent to 925.09.

Is this all the Lightworker's fault? Of course not. But it is partly his fault.

Bear in mind -- the Clinton Recession began, of course, in November-December of 2000. Liberals, seeking to pin this recession on Bush, attempted to spin that inconvenient date by stating the markets were looking forward to Bush's miserable failure economic policies.

Well, the current markets are looking forward to bad economic times compounded by all the wrong economic manueverings.

Thus the Age of Plenty begins with the reminder that Money isn't everything. Love is.

What a lovely thought.

Posted by: Ace at 01:20 PM | Comments (87)
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Awesome. Put him in a Felini movie. Not the White House.

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (44)
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Can anyone upload one of the last sketches in this week's SNL show, the one with Ben Affleck and Bill Hader pitching a movie?

Let me know if you can.

Thanks.

Dowloading... You can download the whole last segment of the show here, downloading each of the four zipped pieces, but it's going to take a while.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (67)
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Just had a tip from a max McCain donor who called their office to find out if McCain would defend Palin. He gave his name and explained he had donated the max, establishing he deserved some amount of customer service.

"That person," this idiot insisted, "has already been fired."

"You mean Randy Sheunemann? He wasn't the one smearing her, he was the one defending her."

"You don't understand," the guy "arrogantly" responds (characterization from source), "He's been fired. It's been handled."

"You don't seem to understand. Sheunemann is not the person smearing Palin," my guy says again.

"Look," the guy says, becoming irritated on top of being arrogant, "Senator McCain cannot step out and defend Palin every single time someone says something bad about her."

"Can he do it once?"

Hang up.

He called back to get the guy's name. He got hung up on again.

I don't really want to do this, but whatever, this guy wants me to. If you want to punk or annoy this feller, hit "2" after you dial McCain's campaign line to get this guy. (I'll not post the number to make it slightly harder to do; I'm not sure I want to make it completely easy to flood their lines with calls.)

Is this wrong? I don't know.

But I think Jack Tors and Sol and Frank Rizzo also donated the max, and should say so.

Treacher... asked earlier to send out the word that McCain must defend Palin.

I guess there are two ways of doing this: The serious way, and the Jerky way.

Sample Script: It's unbelievable to me that anyone reading this site doesn't know Frank Rizzo, Sol, and Jack Tors. Here's Frank making a call.

Language Warning for the f-word and "Sizzle-chest." more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (198)
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I've been trying to write this for a month, with no luck. I just dashed off a sketchy email about this, and since this is the closest I've come to getting this into words, I'll post it. Otherwise I'll never write it.

I can't help but notice a lot of the "Republicans' most enamored of
Obama, and most disgusted by Palin, are upper-class twits. Either by
birth or by adoption of their culture.

I'm betting wallace and schmidt are, too.

A lot of this is pure class/cultural disgust at those boisterous,
declasse blue collar types.

Hey, Palin got shit done in Alaska. But blue collar morons are good
at fixin' shit, aren't they? As David Brooks noted, Obama can easily
cite Neibhur in conversation. (However you spell his name.) That's
the important thing, you know.

The lower classes DO. The upper classes ARE.

It was one thing when George W. Bush, a patrician plainly comfortable with the blue collar sector of the country, ran for office. Sure, he adopted a lot of the tastes and assumptions of the blue collar working-stiff class (and apparently he was pretty genuine about that), but we could all rest easy knowing, by blood, he was a good solid upper-upper class Connecticut aristocrat.

Sarah Palin? Not only was she born blue collar, but, unlike Scranton Joe Biden (Obama love 'im), she disgustingly has refused to evolve past the bitter, clingy station she was born to.

For God's sake, she was a Governor. She could have gained entry to the soft (as in arriviste) upper class at any time she set her mind to it.

And yet she refused.

The hell, man? It's like she just doesn't want to become better than she is.

Again: I've written on this too many times in the past to write it again.

So I'll just link this old piece. To not alienate the PUMAs still here, I'll note that "liberals" means the liberals you don't like, either.

The aristocracy has always sought to differentiate itself from the hoi polloi by signaling other aristocrats via the conspicuous display of manners and opinions marking them as elite. In the 1920's, for example, the highborn would talk about opera and symphony, but never popular music-- popular music was for the lower classes, and if you enjoyed a pop song, it was best to keep that to yourself. They would discuss live theater but never filmed features-- again, the first was accpetable, the latter declasse. And of course there is all that stuff about eating and drinking.

Gosford Park catalogued much of this, especially in the screenwriter's commentary, which, for my money, was more interesting than the actual movie.

We still have a moneyed aristocracy, of course. And I imagine that many of those old rules still apply (although, quite frankly, I wouldn't know for certain).

What I find interesting from a sociological standpoint is liberals' aping of the opinions and manners of the aristocracy, usually with a healthy infusion of kneejerk progressive politics, as a new form of differentiation from the masses whom they so clearly despise. Just as the old middle classes would also attempt to mimic the behaviors of the wealthy, so too do today's liberals -- even those who aren't very wealthy at all -- seek to emulate the codes and mores of the leisure-class to show that they, too, belong in the company of the elite.

Quick proof: Go find any liberal. Ask him what he thinks about USAToday. If he does not immediately say "McPaper," I will buy you a Filet-O-Fish or McRib (your choice; supplies are limited).

Now, USAToday is neither an especially good paper nor an especially bad one; it's not really remarkable in any way. But the word has come down from the liberal aristocrats that the proper attitude towards USAToday is that it is a McPaper, and so that's what they all say, even if (as is usually the case) they've never so much as read the paper before in their lives.

They call it McPaper because of a series of faux-aristocratic biases -- the "mom and pop" local operation is always more virtuous than the national franchise, anything that smacks of mass-appeal is to be automatically despised, etc. -- and they say it's a McPaper, over and over again, for the same reason 1920's aristocrats all talked about the operas they usually slept through-- to signal to other "Progressive Elites" that they Belong, that They Are Part of the Higher Class.

See Also: Classical Values, with a fresher take on the New Aristocracy.

Posted by: Ace at 12:15 PM | Comments (105)
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Led Zeppelin kept ruthlessly on message and excited the youth voters. They ran a brilliant campaign and there's no point in Cream trashing them.

Sure, Zep may have cheated a bit, swiping the occasional song from Robert Johnson, but they're Our Band now and we should hope they are good stewards of Rock.

Thanks to MichaelB.

And Yeah... Zep had a creepy messianic thing, with that "Jimmy Page is God!" stuff, but still...

Posted by: Ace at 11:56 AM | Comments (106)
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Really? You think, Evan? Garsh, I never noticed.

Things they're only willing to admit post November 4th. I expect we may see a few more of these.

One that might eventually come: "Hey, the fact that Barack Obama was mentored by a left-wing revolutionary terrorist and a left-wing revolutionary hate-preacher is kind of a bad thing, isn't it?"

From Allah, who notes that of course Evan Thomas can only mean this in the nicest way possible.

Having gone into the tank so monstrously this election cycle, it will be interesting to see how far the media extends this Speak No Evil code of silence about their Messiah for four years.

The Onion: Sums it up. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (101)
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I did give him an out. I wrote, "If it's true, let me know that, too." *

FWIW, and this isn't from the source, this is just from me: We can blame McCain for a lot (and Bush too, and the GOP as a whole), but I don't think he has anything to do with this. Except letting it fester a bit. But he's had a lot on his plate.

* Not sure he'd trust me enough not to burn him and toss him in with the Traitors to Palin. I wouldn't do that. But he doesn't know that. I would hope he'd know that, but maybe he doesn't.

Still, I did offer the out.

More: Palin reacts: smearers "small and bitter."

Allah pegs the number of sources at three, and we've likely got all three accounted for -- if you toss Niccole Wallace's husband Mark (also working for the campaign) into the mix.

Frum: ...isn't shy about saying this "knifework" has Nicole Wallace's fingerprints all over it.

He wants her to step forward.

She will.

Bookdeal, baby.

Personally, I can't wait for when I choose to stab the conservative movement in the back, make up all sorts of lurid stories, and collect my million buck.

More: Slublog--

A poster at Hot Air just raised a good point about the McCain staff smear thing: this is a guy who instantly went on the attack against his own party when they brought up Jeremiah Wright as an issue, but won't go to bat while his veep choice gets attacked by people who worked for him.

Yup.

McCain has always felt "dishonorable" when taking the side of Republicans. This is, I think, why he would not call Obama and the Democrats out on Fannie Mae/CRA: Because to do so would have put him firmly on the side of his fellow Republicans, and incidentally helped them while helping himself.

And he just could not bring himself to do that. He defined himself as the anti-Republican.

Posted by: Ace at 11:23 AM | Comments (96)
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Lots of moronpalooza email addresses have been created for various cities across the country. I scrapped the idea of listing them all here when I got up to around 25 of them.

SO:

If you are hosting one of these email addresses for the purpose of getting a crew together, and you don't already have too many people (you don't want to rent out an auditorium), please repost your city and meetup email addy in this thread for others to find.

Please do not clutter this thread with other comments.

This thread is just for email addies and the cities they represent. Spare the morons from having to wade through a 200+ long thread just to find one piece of information.

Posted by: LauraW at 10:58 AM | Comments (93)
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Cause there's a Thursday night game, Cleveland and Denver.

In other political news, North Carolina just called for Obama. Still counting in MO. Hell, for all I know the polls in St. Louis could still be open.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 10:10 AM | Comments (21)
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