THE GDP deflator will reflect this new reading, pushing us close to recession. Dollar strength is an illusion because weakness in foreign currency is responsible, and that move is mostly attributable to the Eurozone bending on interest rate hikes. I don't understand how we can have economic growth without wage increases, and increases in personal income, they aren't going to put money back into peoples pockets by going back to the heady days of home equity extraction. The fact is Joe Mortgage holder didn't have to pony up the difference when his assets were marked to market, the banks took the hit, and by inference taxpayers. When does the working class (50% of GDP comes from the bureaucracy) get a pay raise, or a job? When the taxpayers say so? Or when Congress does what is has been doing for eight years, ignoring their constituents, and pushing through payhikes and new pork barrel spending programs?

Listen closely enough and you hear every reason under the sun for the high price of oil, War with Iran was only one of them, but curiously when the Bush people opened a diplomatic window, the price of oil came down. Someone mentioned the suprising lack of effect of supply reports, which should tell you that this market is being driven by other forces. The real question is why would they drive the price of oil higher in the first place, but sometimes the answer is obvious, to coincide with an election, and the public responds well to fear. $150 oil got their attention. I suppose they had the oil drilling meme rehearsed ahead of time, from their cone of silence. haha.

Democrats weren't ready for the kind of success they had in the 2004 midterm elections. Remember the drop in energy prices that year? We could go to 60$ oil by November, but will that curry favor with voters? Not likely.

Obama needs to ride the Democratic groundswell. I don't think he is going to win this election on his own.

McCain Obama bears some close analogy to the Webb Allen contest, in which Allen's personal comments hurt him, and in which Webb made the Iraq war a referendum. (So who is Obama's Veep going to be, someone who can make the Iraq war an issue, perhaps)

It may not be easy, but it may be inevitable.

We try to encourage every third worlder to adapt our specialized and outmoded models of behaviour: entrepreneurship, a military and security based political class, or art as intellectual property, mechanically reproduced and distributed through economic channels.

The adolescent was a brief moment in time, the 1950's mostly, and as quickly as it came, it disappeared. There are no adolescents in India and China, you simply grow up.

As an artist I think that is a terrible waste. Adolescence is a time when we can form ideas, without being forced to accept any of the consequences. Marketing adolescents only forces them into one of the aforementioned categories.

Sometimes the adolescenct tends to rebel against itself. The teenage children of the flower generation became Reaganites, they wore three piece suits, and they committed themselves to making money. Very rebellious. The first generation of adolescents, understood the current world much better than we do now. And of course its grownups who go to Disneyworld. They have the cars, the cash, the recreational mindset.

There's a lot more to this.

Republicans are badly overestimating how well Putin understands their bellicose posturing on Georgia. Republicans think they can mouth endless threats, and the Russians will understand the game. If I were in the MSM I would ask Putin, who do you want for President? There is some unspoken rule that foreign powers do not interfere in American elections, but rules are always made to be broken, and this time, especially, it might be useful to get an outside perspective. I think Putin would give thoughful answers, to thoughful questions, that would give us some real perspective about the choices we face.

Republicans face a real danger here, of starting something they cannot do anything to stop. In the end Americans don't want Cold War II, AND the War on Terror. Bush and his people have verbally abused the American left at will, and have come to expect the media to back them up, but Democrats in Washington have no real political power. Russia does, and it could be another in a long list of misjudgements for Bush and his pals.

Is that the agency which was supposed to protect us from poisonous Chinese toys? The agency headed by Nancy Nord? They have like three employees? Didn't the other Nan, Pelosi, haul Nord up in front of committee? Didn't the Speaker lose that one too?

Talk about bad metaphors.