Shocking News!!!

Retail sales fell again in September! (See The New York Times story.)

Wait a minute! Just what did you expect would happen with the price of fuel through the roof, unemployment climbing, and the banking system facing collapse? That we'd all run out to Wally-World and buy trunk loads of plastic flowers?

At some point in the not so distant past, America stopped producing enough stuff to afford to keep buying lots of stuff, and so the American economy was fueled by a steadily increasing population of immigrants—Americans themselves had stopped having enough babies to keep their population growing—and by steadily inflated housing.

Eventually, things caught up to America. There were only so many computers to buy and so many McMansions to live in and try to sell to the neighbors for more than they could possibly be worth.

We bought SUVs, and then they told us we shouldn't drive them, and then they complained that the price of gas was falling because we weren't driving to shop enough. Now, come on! Which is it?

It was like our entertainment. We have a cable running into our house that can pump 500 channels for us to choose from, but the TV people can only come up with just so much programing, not nearly enough to fill all of those pipes, so they pump re-runs of re-runs at us and play the same old third rate movie over and over again.

It just got to be too much.

So we turned to The Dude: "I mean, there needs to be a wholesale effort against racial profiling, which is illiterate children." — George W. Bush, 2nd presidential debate, October 2000. (Well, there is one economic term in that statement. Maybe he was talking about the economy.)

Tonight is the final debate between Obama and McCain. McCain has promised to come out swinging, and everyone is waiting to see if Obama's "rope-a-dope" strategy will get him through this final flurry.

The Republicans have promised that the fix is in, at least in a few states and as long as McCain can keep the fight close going into the final round, but McCain has just flat out pissed so many Republicans off over the past twenty-five years that it's not clear who's in his corner anymore.

At this point it looks like even members of the White House may be planning to vote for Obama, especially since McCain brought that Holy Roller in to be his second. There are some who are convinced her real job is on SNL and that she's really not the Governor of Alaska at all.

Of course, I'm not even sure if there is a place called Alaska, as I've never been there, so maybe the whole thing is a creation of some TV producer's madcap mind.

The tough part is that if Obama is elected the only people who will be allowed to complain about him is other black men and foreigners. It's just unseemly for white folks to elect a black man to office and then complain about him.

It reminds me of when Richard Nixon resigned. There was that seriously feel good moment and then the big letdown. The best you could do with Gerald Ford was poke a little fun at the fact that he sometimes tripped over his own feet in public. Now who hasn't done that?