Over 200,000,000 served

That thing's operational!

Heaven help us if they get lasers

An excerpt from America's Great Depression:

Having warned the Exchange of a Congressional investigation, Hoover induced the Senate to investigate the Stock Exchange, even though he admitted that the Federal Government had no constitutional jurisdiction over a purely New York institution. The President used continual pressure to launch the investigation of what he termed "sinister" "systematic bear raids," "vicious pools... pounding down" security prices, "deliberately making a profit from the losses of other people." Beside such demagogic rhetoric, constitutional limitations seemed pale indeed. Secretary of Commerce Lamont protested against the investigation, as did many New York bankers, but Hoover was not to be dissuaded. In answering the New York bankers, Hoover used some unknown crystal ball to assert that present prices of securities did not represent "true values." The stock market viciously persisted in judging stocks according to their earnings, a useful criterion that Hoover seemed to find vaguely traitorous:

"...the pounding of prices to a basis of earnings by obvious manipulation of the market and propaganda that values should be based on earnings at the bottom of a depression is an injury to the country and to the investing public."

Instead, the public should be "willing to invest on the basis of the future of the United States."

This might sound familiar:

Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2008 — The Securities and Exchange Commission, acting in concert with the U.K. Financial Services Authority, took temporary emergency action to prohibit short selling in financial companies to protect the integrity and quality of the securities market and strengthen investor confidence. The U.K. FSA took similar action yesterday.

One wonders, what original solution to this economic prolapse will they try next?

I read the news today, oh boy

Courtesy of the bleak genii that produce A Softer World.

Ah well, at least the pulled pork should be ready by dinner-time.

Yes, yes it is

With editoral-blogging goodness:

Elected on the promise to end the war, Pelosi and her Democrats have instead voted repeatedly to fund it until the next administration. Even more galling to the anti-war crowd is that there are even more troops in Iraq under Pelosi's Congress than there ever were during Republican Congresses.

But surely they had to be doing something productive... Oh, but they were.

Ideally, this would put to rest the asinine notion that women act any differently than men when saddled with power. Drunk is drunk, and anything in the way when that inebriated cretin assumes control of the heavy machinery will be just as dead. The heavy machinery doesn't give two hoots in Hell about who's driving.

On the plus side, I feel less nauseous about her now than when she assumed the Speaker of the House position. Like an unstable boulder above a mountain roadway, she had potential to sow destruction, but in the midst of grandstanding and rhetoric, she ended up a pebble in the drainage ditch instead. Small blessings, I suppose.

On the bright side, it's Friday