Sunday's Parade magazine

We thought the "Parade" magazine that comes with most Sunday papers had a very odd cover this week, proclaiming Benazir Bhutto as "America's best hope against al Qaeda." This was ten days after she'd been assassinated. ooops.

Favorite comments on weekend debates

from Vodkapundit's drunkblogging of the Saturday debates:

8:10pm Edwards: "If I were President, and knew were bin Laden was, I’d go get him." Which is like me saying, "If I were John Holmes and had a 13-inch penis, I’d be nailing a lot more porn starlets." The first two parts are wishful thinking, making the third part unlikely in the extreme. And, sorry, I know I promised to stop talking about my giant penis.
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8:58pm The question is something about "experience versus change." Enough already! Can’t we talk about competency or principles or whether Britney’s real problem is due to drugs or mental illness? Just one thing we care about, please.
9:00pm Did you know that Hillary has experience? Experience with change? Change that only her experience, her experience with change, can bring about? And that she’s a woman, a woman bringing change with her experience of womanness? Yeah, me neither.
9:01pm I half-expected Richardson to claim to have womanly changes, too.
9:02pm Damn Obama! SPOILER ALERT: Barack says the Redskins lost. I might as well just turn off the TiVo now. Also, he’ll bring more change, by bringing us together, changingly.
9:04pm Maybe it’s the vodka, but I see Vikings in a British diner, chanting, "Change, change, change, change, change, change, change!"
9:05pm "Change! Wonderful change!"
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9:12 Couldn’t Edwards have paid for that girl’s liver transplant, just with the money he could have saved by turning down the heat in one of the smaller wings of his giant mansion? I know that’s not his job, but his complaints about her case don’t jibe with his claim to have "taken it personally." If it’s personal, then act that way.
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9:17pm Listening to the Dems take on "special interests" is like listening to Dick Cheney take on Haliburton.
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9:28pm Clinton says we’re approach a recession, and she’s probably right. What’s telling is, her one statistic: The unemployment rate has increased to five whole percent. A modern recession is better than a 1970s growth period. Cool.
9:35 Bill Richardson just claimed that he "runs" the "state economy" of New Mexico. I can see him with his eyeshades and pencil, determining the markdowns at Safeway and the wage increases at Los Alamos National Laboratories.

Oil and the Dollar

An interesting article from the WSJ on why high gas prices may be more the result of a weak dollar than lack of oil. Good graph, and here's the summary paragraph:

The larger danger here, as we've been warning for some time, is that the U.S. seems to be returning to the Carter-era economic policy mix of tight fiscal policy (tax increases) and easy money. Add barriers to oil and natural gas production and you have a recipe for higher oil prices and slower growth. In a word, for stagflation. The Reagan-Volcker policy mix of the 1980s changed all that, but maybe we have to relearn the hard way every generation or so what works -- and what produces $100 oil.