Fiddling While Rome Burns

While McCain whines that Obama was referring to Palin when he used the phrase "lipstick on a pig," and the federal government refuses to step in, Lehman Brothers is going down the tubes, possibly pulling AIG with it, while Merrill Lynch will apparently be acquired by Bank of America.

According to Bloomberg.com,

"Reports this month point to a heightened risk of a recession. Unemployment rose to a five-year high of 6.1 percent last month, and retail sales fell 0.7 percent, excluding autos, the biggest decline this year....

'Financial conditions are extremely fragile,' said former Fed governor Lyle Gramley, now a senior economic adviser for the Stanford Group Company in Washington. 'With the Lehman situation deteriorating, this tends to have knock-on effects.'

In a sign that creditors don't expect Paulson to blink, the cost to protect against defaults by AIG, Merrill, WaMu and Wachovia Corp. reached records. Credit-default swaps on Seattle- based WaMu are trading at levels that imply a 75 percent chance the company will default in the next five years, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. valuation model shows."

This may only be the beginning. According to the New York Times, there is concern that the wave of failures will inspire certain fund managers to look for other weakened financial institutions and try to make a fortune by selling them short.

So where do we go from here? Is this the start of a new Depression, or will the wizards of Wall Street manage to stop the dominoes from falling? Only time will tell. But I do know it is a sign that something is very seriously wrong with our economy, and despite all of these important issues, the only thing the media can talk about is the "lipstick on a pig" controversy.

I am starting to lose hope for this country. The latest polls show that McCain continues to gain on Obama and now the electoral vote is no longer in Obama's favor.

If the American public doesn't wake up and start realizing that the McCain campaign is playing them for fools - just as George W. Bush has done for 8 years - we may get McCain and Palin in the White House. And here we thought maybe, this time, they wouldn't be so stupid.

But as H.L. Mencken said, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

He also said:

"The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

Unfortunately, Mencken was apparently a very wise man.