Airwaves Up for Sale:

The news that you are likely to miss and will surely be under reported, on Thursday the federal government will begin auctioning off large amounts of the nation's airwaves. Likely winners will be the huge wireless phone companies, according to today's Times.

Radio spectrum licenses are being returned from television broadcasters, who are converting to digital. The Times characterizes the transactions as "coveted as oil reserves are to energy companies."

Asian Markets React to Plunging U. S. Market:

While the American economy stagnated under the Bush administration's idiosyncratic behavior, the Asian and European economies were supposed to be "decoupling," moving away from a reliance on the U. S. market place and trading with each other. But as The New York Times reports this morning, decoupling can only go so far. After yesterday's drop in market value, the Asian market continued to fall off dramatically, forecasting a potential world-wide recession. According to the Times, "the Frankfurt Stock Exchange plummeted 7.2 percent, its steepest one-day decline since Sept. 11, 2001." And "The 7.4 percent drop in the Sensex index in Mumbai was the second-worst single-day tumble in its history." Meanwhile "in the Western Hemisphere. Canadian stocks were down nearly 5 percent, and a key market index in Brazil was off 6.6 percent."

Today The Fed has cut the prime rate to 3.5 percent, the largest drop since 1990, when Bush's father was president and homelessness was at a high not seen since The Great Depression.

Yesterday's News:

With the American stock exchange closed yesterday, the focus turned to the international scene. World-wide stock markets are reacting negatively to the American economic free-fall as stocks drop everywhere. (See The New York Times article here.)

Today's Washington Post characterizes the financial situation this way: "Stock markets around the world plummeted yesterday as a financial crisis that began in the market for U.S. home mortgages spread to almost all corners of the globe."

Today in History:

Today marks the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the U. S. In an interesting side note, while the abortion rate drops in the U. S., use of RU-486, the "abortion pill," is on the rise. (See The Washington Post story.)

Today's Bushism: "Then I went for a run with the other dog and just walked. And I started thinking about a lot of things. I was able to—I can't remember what it was. Oh, the inaugural speech, started thinking through that." — George W. Bush, January 22, 2001, U. S. News & World Report.