What a difference a week makes, eh, Laura? How utterly disappointing. **** update: Not serious. Serious. Christina Romer is right. We are so fucked.

Palin, on facebook: […] First, we need to get serious about our deficit. No more accounting gimmicks. No more cuts in “out-years” that never materialize. The permanent political class in D.C. might be fooling themselves with these Enron-like accounting games, but they’re not fooling the world’s capital markets. And we don’t need any more happy talk from the White House about “investing” in solar shingles and really fast trains. The

He’s about 50 minutes late so far, but honestly, isn’t that about par for the course? While we wait, enjoy these video flashbacks: We’ve lost a couple trillion in asset values in the market in the last handful of days. Is it too late to admit that we hope he fails?

John Chambers of S&P noted that Cut Cap and Balance was the only proposal that, had it become law, would have avoided the HISTORIC! credit downgrade. The Democrat-led Senate refused to vote on (and the President threatened to veto) CC&B after it passed the House in a bipartisan vote — a failure to compromise, in that CC&B agreed to raise the debt ceiling, as the Democrats were demanding, in exchange

Notes Limbaugh, Obama inherited a 5.7% unemployment rate and a AAA rating from George Bush. And now look! My. How unhelpful. Still, it’s spreading.

Michele Malkin on the latest attempt by the Mean Girl media to create an iconography that paints serious conservative women as batshit crazy. My. All that women’s studies and postmodern feminist activism sure has yielded some precious cultural fruit, hasn’t it? That’s right: You’ve come a long way, baby! [thanks to Darleen]

Roger Kimball: It’s worth thinking carefully about this brisk reveille that Standard & Poor’s has brought us. As Amilya Antonetti noted in her interview with Neil Cavuto, the business community was not surprised by the news. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin: they had seen the writing on the wall for months. S&P issued a warning last spring, which prompted Timothy Geithner’s little “no risk” ejaculation. The narrative is now up for

Looks like it: The credit rating agency’s managing director, John Chambers, tells ABC’s “This Week” that if the fiscal position of the U.S. deteriorates further, or if political gridlock tightens even more, a further downgrade is possible. Chambers also said Sunday that it would take “stabilization and eventual decline” of the federal debt as a share of the economy as well as more consensus in Washington for the U.S. to