Wednesday Potpourri

Potpourri? I hafta tellya, no matter how I type the word, it looks wrong.

Ah, well. Excelsior! Or maybe the other direction. Tam's got her Pugsley; my bete noir, dependably haunting the headlines whenever I need a quick snark, is dear ol' Kim Jong Il (assuming the rumors are untrue and he hasn't been dead for about five years) and his Very Own Personal Nation ("Ask The Man Who Owns One"), which has tossed out the IAEA inspectors and is fixin' to reassemble the very same reactor/bomb-building complex where they were so happily knockin' over cooling towers in July. Not enough bacon in the last food shipment? Too much salt? You do have to admire his (and his minions) ability to turn muddy situations into deep doodoo. The only question is just how much longer the world's action-oriented anti-proliferation movements will lay off -- Israel, for instance. Or even his good, goood buddies in Red China, who may yet decide to dig that burr out from under their saddle if they can stop snickering at how much it bothers everone else.

As the Great Financing Mess continues, it becomes more and more clear that lax Federal lending standards, coupled with regulatory pressure on banks to extend credit to a "broad cross-section of their markets," i.e., the poor, i.e., people who were not gonna be able to repay, is what set the situation up and who was it pushed for this and railed against attempts to restrain it? The more liberal Democratic congresscritters, is who, making snippy remarks about how the banks could well afford to do this and Wall Street needed to "get over it." These would be the very same treasonous rats who are now sneering at the "failure of the free market." 'Twasn't free, oh jacks of asses, you were twisting its arm. I guess their theory is, you beat he cow and starve it while milking it three times a day and when that ceases to work, blame the cow. I continue to blame FDR for this kind of thinking -- but one of his kin really started the ball rolling downhill. (The next time I hear how Teddy Roosevelt "invented the modern Presidency," I will either burst into tears or try to punch the person who said it; he was a wonderful man but a disaster for the Republic).

...And that's all the snark and controversy I've time for this fine morning. Fortunately, the raw materials are inexhaustible.