Anti-depressants

Peggy Noonan explains the crash.

The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the '00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn't notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi.

And there you thought it was decades of widespread de-regulation that "lessened" their "normal, prudent anxiety. I am pretty sure Pegs was "high as a kite" when she wrote this.

Breaking: The sky is not falling

Mike McConnell tells Congress, "Never mind."

On Friday evening, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell had said in an unusually blunt letter to Congress that the nation "is now more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats" because lawmakers had not yet acted on the administration's proposal for the wiretapping law.

But within hours of sending that letter, administration officials told lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees that they had prevailed upon all of the telecommunications companies to continue cooperating with the government's requests for information while negotiations with Congress continue.

...."Unfortunately, the delay resulting from this discussion impaired our ability to cover foreign intelligence targets, which resulted in missed intelligence information," Mukasey and McConnell added.

Government officials declined to comment on how much intelligence data may have been lost or how serious it might have been.

One Democratic congressional official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, expressed skepticism that any significant gap had existed, noting that existing rules permit continued monitoring of known terrorists and their associates.

...."This is serious backpedaling by the DNI," the Democratic official said of McConnell. "He's been saying for the last week that the sky is falling, and the sky is not falling."

Or....



Congratulations to the remaining vertebrates in Congress who pushed back and refused to be cowed by Bush's wild-eyed hysterics. It was a first, I know. Hopefully, Democrats in the Senate took notice.

"Fear," so much better than "change"

I'm not sure we liboruls should be giving them any ideas.

After all, what do most "value voters" fear most? Change.

"Collapsing freedom-loving democracies like us"

Steve Benen calls this the "Dumbest. Ad. Ever" and writes

Glenn Greenwald recently explained that some portions of the conservative movement are genuinely convinced that we're this close to a global Islamic theocracy. It's absurd -- as Yglesias noted, "The idea that we should be laying awake at night afraid that a group of at most several thousand people who control almost no territory or valuable military equipment might establish a universal caliphate or 'collapse freedom loving nations like us' is ridiculous." And yet, that's the basis for a campaign ad from a top-tier Republican candidate.

It is certainly a grammatical nightmare.

And it is certainly disturbing that a "top tier" candidate for president spent a lot of (his own) money to spout such puerile nonsense, but it is in no way surprising. Romney has read the polls and he knows that that 30% who still support preznit believe this stuff. And they're the base of the Republican party primary voters. So it is quite natural for Romney to invoke these scimitar wielding jihadists and Iranians, and claim that he'll keep us safe in our beds with an even bigger army and wiretapping every call coming from any place east of New Hampshire. With Rudy! cuing the towers collapsing footage every time he opens his mouth, Romney has to prove his credentials as a "leader" who understands the threat from brown skinned people who pray towards Mecca several times a day.