"Angels and ministers of grace defend us!"
--Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4
So here we are, the Obama election plus 16 days. The stock market has continued to tank, despite an election supposedly geared toward "change" and getting rid of the "failed policies of the Bush Administration" (never mind that the economy only turned seriously sour in the last two years). Now the Dow and the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ and every other major market indicator is heading for record-low territory, at least by current standards. The Dow Jones Industrial Average settled at around 7,500 today, and volatility continues to run amok.
Where the heck is Obama's big plan for fixing all of this? Shouldn't he be out there calming the markets by promising--oh, something? Anything? Tax cuts? Tax increases?
If a bailout is such a great thing for America, why is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid so concerned about a Republican filibuster? The Republican Senators are not the rebellious ones--those are the House Republicans. So to blame the GOP for his party's failure to pass a bailout bill when they have a ruling majority is a bit of chutzpah and prevarication, in my opinion.
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And while that foolishness is going on, we've got Somail pirates seizing oil tankers in the Indian Ocean. Does anyone know where they're taking these ships? What they're doing with them? And why are these acts not tied to al-Qaeda, when they have a base in Somalia? If al-Qaeda can seize control of four commercial airliners, they can certainly find a use for a supertanker filled with two million barrels of crude oil. Weird world out there. I don't have any brilliant thoughts or solutions to any of this except, perhaps, to send the U.S. Marine Corps to deal with the pirates--that was one of their first jobs 203 years ago, on "the shores of Tripoli."
And, as I posted on my Twitter account, I wish Obama well because I wish the country well. Gosh knows we'll both need every prayer and good grace we can get in the coming year.
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Oh yeah, and the IAEA now reports that Iran has enough nuclear material to make a small nuclear weapon. Let's be careful out there.
1 comment:
Our satellites should have no difficulty locating the tanker. Perhaps we could resurrect Executive Solutions in a naval form.
Perhaps the market is continuing to collapse precisely because we elected a Fabian socialist to lead a socialist Congress.
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