Heh. More here.

Of course, it always helps to get good press coverage with headlines like this: "McCain Will Be in Lehigh Valley Today -- But Where?"

Unrelated...no blood in ants.

This is an open thread -- that means you guys can talk about whatever you want for the whole day. I'm writing a book. Stop annoying me. :-) 

Wachovia, one of the more prominent banks that isn't based here in Philly but happily takes our money, just announced that it lost nearly $9 billion and is laying off 6,350 workers.

Do you think maybe this has something to do with it?

Wachovia has been suffering from its 2006 acquisition of Golden West Financial Corp. The bank paid roughly $25 billion for the California mortgage lender known for exotic loans.

The so-called "Pick-a-Payment" loans, which Wachovia inherited from Golden West, have proved a headache for the bank and a lightning rod for shareholders, defaulting at higher rates than other mortgages.

Wachovia recently discontinued offering the "Pick-A-Payment" loan option, which allows customers to pay a less-than-full interest payment on all new home loans. The bank also had hired The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to conduct an analysis of its loan portfolio and advise it on strategic alternatives.

Why does the world seem to go completely off its rocker every 100 years or so. It happened in 1914.

It's happening now.

1. Promote the living daylights out of this study that shows Philadelphia is the fifth most walkable city in America. This was already one of the city's secret assets, but with gas at $4.08 a gallon, the whole world needs to know.

2. Bench Jimmy Rollins for the first game of the upcoming Mets series, for his ridiculous failure to run hard yesterday on a Victorino bloop on which he had a 50-50 chance of scoring, which would have snatched a victory from the jaws of defeat.

3. Make a deal to get those two idiotic slots parlors off of Delaware Avenue and then make the whole world relatively happy by combining them into one giant casino and entertainment zone at the South Philly sports complex, right where the Spectrum is being knocked down.

4. Don't make this stupid trade for Colorado's Matt Holiday and mortgage the next 4-5 years of baseball in Philly for what would probably be a soon-forgotten four-day one-and-done in the 2008 playoffs. Please develop what little young talent you have left.

5. Michael Nutter's 2008 has been a little like Jimmy Rollins' -- not a lot of errors, but little inspiring play, either. Here's an idea -- use your bully pulpit as mayor to get those 10,000 black men out in the street.

6. Cancel those insufferable Lehigh workouts and go straight to the NFL regular season.

7. Build this 1,500-foot skyscraper, (pictured at top, via Philly Skyline). even though the developers have no experience and probably no idea what they're doing. Like the walkable city study, a dramatic skyline tells the world that Philly is a happening place.

8. Stop shooting one another.

9. Build a 9,000-seat arena in Chester to house the soon-to-be homeless Phantoms and Kixx -- Delco is probably the market for those teams, anyway, and then Chester will have just about everything except for, of course, a supermarket.

10. Impeach George W. Bush while there's still time. Hey, that would make the world a better place, and Philly was part of the world last time I checked.

We can't let this kind of talk inside the United States:

QUNU, South Africa — Nelson Mandela celebrated his 90th birthday Friday by calling on the wealthy to share with the poor and wishing that he had been able to spend more time with his family during the long anti-apartheid struggle.

In an interview at his home in rural southeastern South Africa, the icon was asked if he had a message for the world.

"There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty," Mandela said.

At least Mandela is off the terror watch list, thanks to legislation. What about 400,000 other people -- some of whom are your law-abiding neighbors or relatives, or you -- still on that list? Frankly, I don't understand what the Democrats and Obama don't make more hay about this -- it's a civil rights issue that outrages most people, and can't easily be demagogued like Gitmo and some of the others.

Saying he is "sympathetic to late night comedians' struggle to find jokes to make about me," Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) today issued a list of official campaign-approved Barack Obama jokes.

The five jokes, which Sen. Obama said he is making available to all comedians free of charge, are as follows:

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, "You know, we don't get many kangaroos here." Barack Obama replies, "At these prices, I'm not surprised. That's why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil."

-- Comedian Andy Borowitz

No doubt about it, the flap over that Obama New Yorker cover has created a crisis for political humor in this country. I actually seem to be in the minority in thinking that the cover was funny and an effective satire (there's a broader issue there I may write about when I come back full-time); I also tend to agree with Maureen Dowd (that's rare these days) and others who say it would be good if Obama and his supporters could lighten up a little.

Why don't they?

Forget Monty Python -- here's the real "killer joke" of American politics.

Al Gore invented the Internet.

Of course, he never really said that, but after a year of repetition from a brain-dead political media, amplified by late-night comics looking for punchlines about two pretty dull-seeming candidates in 2000, you'd be hard pressed to find a voter in November 2000 who didn't think Gore had really said that. It was one of a number of exaggerations and outright falsehoods that became running jokes about Gore in 2000, that he'd claimed cleaning up Love Canal, etc. It was a joke, perhaps, but Gore's credibility became a "serious" issue for enough voters that Gore lost Florida by a few hundred votes, lost the Electoral College, and George W. Bush became president.

Eight years later, 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead, New Orleans is still in shambles, and so is the American economy. Ultimately, all because of a "a joke."

It's just hard for people to laugh anything off anymore.

Two months and one day ago:

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," said Bush, in what White House aides privately acknowledged was a reference to calls by Obama and other Democrats for the U.S. president to sit down for talks with leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks to the Israeli Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Today:

WASHINGTON - A top U.S. diplomat heading to Tehran has no plans to meet separately with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, but the mere presence of the Bush administration official at talks between the Iranian negotiator and representatives of other world powers will be a sharp break with past administration policy.

Neville Chamberlain aside, the Bush people would be crazy not to push diplomacy, when the alternative seems to be an Israeli air strike that could plunge the region into a wider war than the one we have now. John McCain is already down in the polls with $138-a-barrel oil -- how do you think he'd do with $238-a-barrel oil?

Is the All-Star Game over yet? I have an idea for any time it goes more than 10 innings -- bring in Josh Hamilton's 71-year-old coach to pitch the 11th to both teams.

Open thread -- discuss whatever.

This is Iraqi medical-doctor-turned-journalist Yasser Salihee, who was so thrilled by the prospect of free speech in the early days after the 2003 invasion that he became a reporter in the Baghdad bureau of Knight-Ridder -- his work appeared locally several times in the Inquirer. Regular readers remember that I posted several items (in the forever lost Attytood archives) about his seemingly senseless death at an American checkpoint.

A new report into his death shows the facts are worse than could have been imagined then:

But a yearlong examination by the Sacramento Bee found that the shooter, Staff Sgt. Joseph J. Romero, brought a long, troubled past with him to Iraq, and the Guard unit Vige praised was riddled with misfits, drug users and soldiers with criminal records — at least two of them former mental patients.

At the time that he shot Salihee Romero was under investigation for selling cocaine, military records show.

Days before the shooting, Romero threatened to kill a fellow soldier who reported him to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command or CID. Three weeks later, the drug allegations would prompt the Army to strip Romero of his leadership, bar him from missions and take away his large-caliber sniper rifle.

And less than three months after the shooting, on Sept. 9, 2005, Romero was sentenced to 14 months' confinement and given a bad conduct discharge, convicted of selling cocaine, possessing other drugs, obstructing justice and communicating a threat.

And as for those Iraqi hearts and minds?

"Before the accident I loved the Americans … but after the accident, I hate all the Army," said Salihee’s widow, Raghad al Jabar al Wazan, also a medical doctor. "All my neighbors were hating the Americans."

It's an open thread -- discuss this, or something else.

You're going to hear a lot of blather over the next 2-3 days about how outrageous this New Yorker cover is -- from pro-Obama types and mainstream media fuddy-duddies, about how this is a shameless ploy to sell magazines, yadda, yadda, yadda. I disagree -- I think this is great satire (that's what New Yorker cartoons are, remember?) of how absurd our political discourse has become, showing just how ridiculous the Obama slurs are by taking them all the way over the top. Do you honestly think there's one American who was planning to vote for Obama who will see this, say "Oh my God, they're terrorists!," and change his or her vote?

If there is, God help us. 

Open thread -- I'm on "book vacation," (there's an oxymoron), so you're in charge. I hear Pennsylvania Democrats are corrupt...pass it on. And have a great weekend.