Monday, bloody Monday: most stock exchanges dropped yesterday on continuing investor nervousness over the European debt situation and the weak American jobs picture.

“This is not a pretty environment for equity investors,” said Dennis Gartman, noted economist whose alter ego is that of noted superhero Captain Obvious.

The Spaniards, like the Greeks, are finding this whole "austerity" idea rather off-putting.

Fitch described the British fiscal challenge as "formidable", which caused the market to drive the Pound sharply lower. Lord Throatwobbler Mangrove, MP from Lower Throat-Hack, Chunderworth, called the comments "rather unsporting" and pledged to write an outraged letter to the Financial Times when he got back from Torquay Sunday week.

Ben Bernanke is recovering after being clubbed with a clue-bat yesterday. "The unemployment rate is still going to be high for a while, and that means that a lot of people are going to be under financial stress,” Bernanke said. In other remarks, Bernanke noted that he'd hired a "couple of local coolie-boys" to pull his rickshaw rather than have his mother do it, and thus do his part to alleviate joblessness in his area.

FT's Alphaville has a post on Europe's sovereign-bank loop. This becomes a problem when sovereigns need to roll their debt, and could lead to more busted bond-auctions.

Mish Shedlock covers The Krugman's heart-ache over the G-20's failure to embrace Keynesianism with the enthusiasm of his BFF, Tim Geithner.

Public-sector unions in California are still doing their best to make sure they are hated by every taxpaying citizen. In related news, the SEIU yesterday announced that they have hired a new head for the union, the Grand Moff Tarkin. "Witness the power of this fully-operational public-sector Union!" he gloated to the press.

Today's report brought to you by Depends adult undergarments, Massengill's feminine hygiene products, and the letter G.

Posted by: Monty at 03:41 AM | Comments (87)
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Welcome to the Monday.

In case you haven't heard by now, GGE's wife passed away last week. Details are here.

Margaret Thatcher Does The Dead Parrot Sketch

Here she does her version of Monty Python's Dead Parrot Sketch at the 1990 Conservative Party conference making fun of the Liberal Democrats' new mascot - a parrot. You can watch the original here for comparison. I guess the fact that we're even watching this is proof that Labour MPs don't have access to time machines after all.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:00 PM | Comments (924)
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I'm really not thrilled with Sharon Angle. I know Lowden sounded kooky with that barter-with-chickens thing, but this sounds kookier to me.

Posted by: Ace at 05:51 PM | Comments (73)
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Sacred Honor, it seems, is dictating he remain silent.

I figured if he had anything, anything left -- even faked evidence -- he'd feed it to the local media just before the 11:00 PM shows, hoping to stampede them into running it without really having a chance to vet it.

But... "just before" means before 10:00 PM, I think. You can't literally give it to them five minutes before.

Actually, it's already extremely late for this type of late hit -- Bush's DUI thing was released on the Friday before the election, I think, not the Monday night before. You need your leak to have some time to disseminate and penetrate. (Will Folks just emailed me to say sacred honor compels him to admit he penetrated and disseminated the leak.)

But this is really the last possible moment. None of this hurts Haley if released tomorrow.

So... Earlier I did in fact think there was a possibility, or even a probability, that something untoward happened here.

But no proof is no proof.

Unless he's figuring he'll release the proof before the general election (and why would he do that?), then he's got no proof, and ergo there's nothing here.

Oh, Dear: Larry Marchant took a polygraph about his claims of an affair, paid for by the local Fox News station.

Results? Inconclusive.

Which I read as "deceptive," personally.

Seriously, put one of those boner-meters on him, the ones that measure arousal, and show him scenes from Twillight: New Moon and Swim Fan. They really have to do that before proceeding to the polygraph. First things first.

Posted by: Ace at 05:45 PM | Comments (43)
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Just barely -- 42-39% -- but 39% is not where an incumbent wants to be.

Before you say, "Well, if he's up among registered voters, he must really be up with likely voters!" -- that's actually not the case here. The typical pattern is reversed:

Murray still retains her overall edge among likely voters, those who voted in the 2006 mid-term election. Forty six percent of them said they would vote for the three-term Democratic incumbent, compared to 40 percent for Rossi. And the combined results of all 1,695 registered voters polled during four weeks in May showed Murray edging out Rossi 42 percent to 40 percent.

I think -- but don't know -- that what's gone on here is this: There was polling over four weeks' time, with around 450 people interviewed each poll. The last group interviewed, the most recent, went for Dino Rossi, due to recent publicity/changing opinions. Overall, they still went a bit for Murray.

As for likelies -- I think the likely voters are taken from the entire four weeks of polling, the good-for-Rossi last poll and the bad-for-Rossi earlier polls.

Assuming this isn't just a glitch, but represents a real trend, then it should be the case, as expected, that the next poll of likely voters puts Rossi ahead.

Thanks to Jenjhis.

Posted by: Ace at 05:37 PM | Comments (18)
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He says "assassinate" too. He said this to win support from unions; he got cheers.

What makes this an especially awful statement is that the IRA did attempt to kill Thatcher, and while they failed at that, they crippled a woman in doing so.

And, by the way, the guy who said this -- McDonnell -- supports the IRA:

Meanwhile, just this afternoon, the Labour party leadership hopeful John McDonnell has said that he would like to visit the 1980s and “assassinate Thatcher”.

This was the same McDonnell who once said of Bobby Sands: “It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA.”

Chris Matthews immediately condemned the Tea Party.

When will the right ever cease its incitements to violence?

Posted by: Ace at 05:20 PM | Comments (120)
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All The President's Men.

All hands on deck, huh?

When the boss of an organization really wants something done, he communicates that to his staff, and the company enters a "crunch" or a "redball" or whatever that company calls it. It's a time when you either work your ass off or at least make it appear you're working your ass off, so you don't get fired for slacking.

On the other hand... If the boss mainly seems interested in golfing and trading flatteries with (Sir) Paul MacCartney, well, I guess it's a good time for beer-pong.

In related news: "I want to know whose ass is up for Pictionary."

Do these guys deserve time off?

I'm sure they do. But let me ask a different question: Do the residents of Louisiana deserve to have their coastline destroyed by oil?

Posted by: Ace at 04:31 PM | Comments (196)
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Again.

Compare the lower-right corner; in the original picture, a man stands over the bloodied Israeli holding a combat knife. In Reuters' expurgated version, the knife is cropped out.

Accident? Maybe they just thought that the picture was a better composition if the victim were cropped tighter?

No. Little Greenfootballs found a second picture with a combat knife cropped out.

Via Hot Air.

More: rdbrewer says he thinks he found Reuters photos of the "activists" waiting sweetly for the IDF, and the captain of the boat giving the Israelis a nice hello.

Posted by: Ace at 03:51 PM | Comments (150)
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Obama's new tough-guy quote about his petrocatastrophe: "I want to know whose ass to kick."

Play-acting the role of tough-guy.

Of late, liberals have been knocking Obama, but in the mildest possible way.

When Democrats lose elections, they are fully willing to beat up candidates; this blames the messenger while deflecting away any criticism from the message. The important thing is the message of progressivism, after all. John Kerry is disposable. The latter can and should be razed in order to save the former.

Even weaker than blaming-the-messenger is not even blaming the messenger, per se, but knocking only the manner in which he expresses the message.

In other words -- criticizing Obama on style points only, the most superficial sort of criticism possible, and that, of course, is intentional. No progressive wants to criticize Obama on substance, so instead a weak-sister beef is contrived up over his style in pursuing substance.

And hence, lately, the welter of weak criticism of Obama as being disengaged, of not showing he "feels our pain," of not expressing anger, etc.

All of these criticisms are nonsense, and are nonsense by design.

Obama's problem isn't that he's not "feeling my pain" or "expressing anger" or "connecting with the public on a basic emotional level and demonstrating he shares their outrage."

That "problem" can be fixed in three seconds by posturing and delivering soundbites. Soundbites like "I want to know whose ass to kick."

No, Obama's problem is not one of communications or feigning emotion -- that's PR crap -- but of the inky black reality of an oil spill he is unable to do anything about.

He can't even manage to get protective equipment delivered in a timely fashion to Louisiana to protect its shorelines a little bit.

Obama might have a minor communications and messaging problem -- maybe. But that's trivial to the point of irrelevancy.

His real problem has to do with tangible reality. His real problem is not one of words but of deeds, not of dumb-show pantomimes but one of real-life performance.

So let the liberals make up fake criticisms of Obama that can be addressed by consulting some of his Hollywood screenwriter donors for Action Hero Tough-Guy script lines.

But don't be fooled; his real problem isn't what he's saying, but what he's doing, or more accurately, what he's failing to do.

Progressives, I think, hope to fill the air with this insipid critique of Obama's style so that the real criticism, the more deadly one, the one that can't be addressed by photo ops and squirting a tear as he cradles an oily pelican.

If they use up all the oxygen in the room "criticizing" Obama for wearing the wrong ascot at a photo op, they can keep the real criticism from catching fire.

Posted by: Ace at 03:30 PM | Comments (271)
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Interesting:

A month and a half after the spill began, 69 percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll rate the federal response negatively. That compares with a 62 negative rating for the response to Katrina two weeks after the August 2005 hurricane.

David Broder recently made a rare venture into relevancy when he asked Is Obama's Jimmy Carter Moment Approaching?

He compares the situation to Jimmy Carter's impotency during the Iranian Hostage Crisis -- and notes that Carter's own Jimmy Carter Moment began when an entire show -- Nightline -- hit ratings gold by documenting his fecklessness every night.

Obama's not there of course -- we have no one on TV noting it has been 44 days since Obama ordered "Plug the damn hole" the way that every MFM article about Iraq noted the exact number of days since Bush's banner announced Mission Accomplished.

And he never will get there, because the MFM won't do that to him -- ever -- and an oil slick doesn't have the drama and black-hat villains that the Iranian Hostage Crisis did.

But... Obama's big sale to moderates was that he was competent, whereas Bush wasn't; his current impotency and ineptness either proves he is incompetent just like Bush was, or else proves that some problems are too big even for a president to "fix," which then disproves the idea that Bush was incompetent.

Either way, Obama's Narrative is false.

Posted by: Ace at 02:41 PM | Comments (151)
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