It’s Not Just Strongsville

From Politico, reporting on a McCain town hall in Minnesota:

“[A] man in the audience stood up and told McCain he’s ‘scared’ of an Obama presidency and who he’d select for the Supreme Court.

“‘I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person that you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States,’ McCain said as the crowd booed and shouted ‘Come on, John!’”

I guess this is what happens when he has pangs of conscience and says merely that his opponent is actually a DECENT PERSON: His own supporters turn on him. Later, a woman said Obama was an Arab and McCain had to take the mic from her. Let’s be honest here: Props to the Senator for deciding he won’t further slander an almost-certain future president in a desperate attempt to narrow his deficit.

Meanwhile, in other news, this one-liner just crossed the wires:

“ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Legislative panel finds Palin abused her power in firing of public safety commissioner.”

Keep your eyes peeled on this one.

It’s Time to Buy

The Dow just dropped 690 points in the first six minutes of trading.

Let’s work this out for a minute. A year ago, the Dow was above 14,000. Now it’s below 8,000 and falling. Are you really going to tell me that American corporations are worth half of what they were last year? That’s where we’ll be if it drops another thousand.

See? There was just a 350-point bounce while I’ve been typing this.

If you have any spare money, plow it into stocks. They’re going up.

Unless, of course, we just killed the final capitulation with a rally.

UPDATE: And 30 minutes later, we’re in positive territory. Damn.

… It’s now 10:30 and Still-President Dubya, struggling to appear relevant, is delivering a remarkably bland speech at the White House … summarizing things that the government has already done, then going into standard “America: Fuck Yeah!” kind of economic cheerleading. Awesome. Well, that’s great and all, but you enacted those policies a couple thousand Dow points ago and the credit markets are frozen. Shouldn’t you have waited to speak until you had some new material?

The market is back down about 300 points (and falling), not because of the Prez but due to very ugly results of a credit default swap auction. The volatility index hit 72 this morning, an all-time high, and is still up near 70. The point at which you call markets shaky is 30. Yikes.

UPDATE (7:15 pm): Holy smokes. It’s over. And the magnitude of the damage for the week is mind-boggling. It can be summed up in three words, regarding the performance of the Dow Jones Industrials:

Worst. Week. EVER.