More jitters on Wall Street tomorrow?

Add comment January 22nd, 2008

THIS, which came out after the final bell today, is pretty scary.

Does it portend trouble in the markets on Wednesday?

UPDATE (1/23/08, 3:33 PM CST): Stock prices SOARED Wednesday. The economic scare is over.  No recession looming. Nothing to see here, folks.  Move on.  Return to your homes. (If only it were that simple, right?)

Barack, don’t smoke — and don’t chew

Add comment January 22nd, 2008

 

Call me Victorian (or Vic, for short, if you’d like), but I’ve always hated the sight of people chewing gum in public.  It makes them look like slack-jawed morons.

You can imagine, then, my disappointment at the sight of Barack Obama on TV the other night just chewing away like a Britney Spears fan. For a brief moment, I actually feared that he would use the word “like” five times in every sentence at the next Democratic debate.

I know Obama has been trying to quit smoking, and perhaps the gum is part of that effort.  But please, Senator, not in public.

Fred’s gone

4 comments January 22nd, 2008

The WORD this afternoon is that Fred Thompson is dropping his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Thompson’s problem, I think, was that the early buzz about his presidential ambitions convinced him that he would be hoisted on the shoulders of an ecstatic American populace and carried triumphantly to the White House — without his ever having to utter more than a few conservative cliches.

But he peaked too soon — way too soon.

This past June, nearly three months before he formally announced his candidacy, Thompson became the front-runner for the GOP nomination merely on the wings of rumors that he might throw his hat into the ring. He must have thought to himself that this exercise was going to be like a walk in the park. Perhaps that’s why he dawdled for so long before taking the plunge.

Thompson’s early popularity made no sense to me. The vast majority of Americans knew nothing of him beyond what they’d seen of him in movies and on television. Ordinary folks who saw him as presidential timber apparently were only  enamored of the kind of fictional characters he plays. They seemed to think of him as a Washington outsider, unaware that he had been paid tons of money over several decades to pimp for corporations in the corridors of political power. They seemed not to know that his military experience had been pretty much limited to roles in movies like “The Hunt for Red October.”

It all seemed to fit a certain curious tendency among some conservative Republicans.  They claim to hate Hollywood, but they’re more likely than liberal Democrats to fall in love with actors (Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, et al).

I have a theory: Social conservatives, more than liberals, tend to embrace myths and make-believe. They distrust realities that don’t jibe with their fairy tales. They’re more inclined to dismiss scientific evidence of evolution and global-warming. They’re more inclined to see the world in simple terms of good and bad — with no ambiguities — just like in John Wayne’s movies. And just like the false images of America Ronald Reagan used to peddle.

Social conservatives also aren’t likely to subscribe to this philosophy from Adlai Stevenson, the late governor of Illinois and twice a candidate for president: “Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.”

Social conservatives generally see the American flag as more sacred than the U.S. Constitution. That’s because the flag is about emotion, while the Constitution is about complicated concepts that require courts to intepret. We get no freedoms from the flag, but we are supposed to treat it with almost religious reverence. We get our American system — freedoms and all — from the Constitution, but nobody’s going to get upset if I carelessly throw a copy of it in the garbage.

For Fred Thompson, the latest Tinseltown personality to seize the imaginations of social conservatives, the bubble burst when his soporific, almost disinterested, campaign style turned out not to be exactly what the GOP  faithful had expected of him. He eventually showed a little zip in the winter debates, but it was too late.

However, if the Republicans are still looking for a Hollywood type to ride to the rescue, maybe Chuck Norris will make himself available once his candidate, Mike Huckabee, follows Thompson out the door.

Rudy in free fall!

2 comments January 22nd, 2008

 

Former Republican Illinois governors Jim Thompson and Jim Edgar, popular moderates both, should have known better than to endorse Rudy Giuliani for president.

They should have known that a thrice-married, pro-choice, pro-gay-rights pol from New York City has as much chance as I do of becoming their party’s choice for the White House.

They have no good cause for surprise that Giuliani now stands on the precipice of POLITICAL OBLIVION.