So much is happening so fast and we just can’t be at the blog 24/7 to cover it, I’ve decided that it will be worthwhile each day from now until Tuesday to have an open thread. Please keep the topics to the election – polls, candidates, issues, that sort of thing. Lets have a free-flowing discussion of the races, the issues and what we think may happen.

All sorts of good effects from Obama’s policies – from Bloomberg:

The lowest-rated junk bonds are the most expensive corporate debt following a Federal Reserve- induced rally in high-risk assets, adding to concern fixed- income securities are overvalued…

Yeah, no freakin’ kidding. Look, this is what happens when you bail out banks, print a couple trillion dollars and just shovel money through the financial sector: all sorts of BS investments become attractive. If you really want to grasp what is happening here – our Federal Reserve is picking our pockets and handing our money to others…and they are buying junk bond with it!

Mish best describes what is happening:

In fact, the Fed’s policies are helping neither the real nor unreal economies unless you consider creating another opportunity for Goldman Sachs and select hedge funds to short at the opportune time, appropriate “help”.

Boil it down: the banksters and bureaucrats are having a ball, and getting ready to stick us with the bill as they will know when to short everything and get out with their wealth intact.

There never was an easy way out of this – but the longer Obama runs the government, Democrats run the Congress and Bernanke runs the Fed, the worse this will get. Voting Republican in 2010 is not a cure-all, but it is the very best first step we can take to right our financial ship.

From SFGate:

In the not to be missed category, Sen. Dianne Feinstein stepped way out of the spin cycle yesterday, as she is often wont to do.

Feinstein was at a campaign event for Sen. Barbara Boxer in San Jose,and was asked by KTVU’s Randy Shandobil how things were going, and she replied, “bad.”

Feinstein is Boxer’s campaign co-chair.

Shandobil asked whether Feinstein meant in the House, which Democrats are widely expected to lose, and Feinstein didn’t answer. Later, after the event, she (un)clarified this much: “I think the prevailing view is, and I don’t think this is necessarily correct, is that it’s a very difficult time, there’s no question about that.”…

Just a bit of truth, sneaking out.

I’ve also noted that some Democrats are trying to pre-spin their loss even as others keep up with an increasingly absurd “we’re doing great!” line. Just how bad it will be remains to be seen – it also remains to be seen how many races will fall inside the “margin of fraud” and thus allow a Democrat here and there squeak through to “victory” (its not a question of if they’ll cheat but, instead, how much they will…of course, the bigger the thumping we give them, the less it matters).

I’ve been observing politics for just a bit more than 30 years and I’ve never seen a situation like this. The level of voter anger eclipses 1980 and 1994; in fact, it may be that we’re in entirely uncharted waters and no one really has a handle on just what will happen on Tuesday – other than it being a rejection of the current Democrat leadership (that is pretty much settled). All anyone can really do at this point is work for his side, and then vote. The ultimate result cannot be altered, at this point, by any one action.

From the Mail and Guardian:

…Global wheat and maize prices recently jumped nearly 30% in a few weeks while meat prices are at 20-year highs, according to the key Reuters-Jefferies commodity price indicator. Last week, the US predicted that global wheat harvests would be 30m tonnes lower than last year, a 5,5% fall. Meanwhile, the price of tomatoes in Egypt, garlic in China and bread in Pakistan are at near-record levels.

“The situation has deteriorated since September,” said Abdolreza Abbassian of the UN food and agriculture organisation. “In the last few weeks there have been signs we are heading the same way as in 2008…

Part of this is just related to climate – not the bogus “global climate change” of the left, but the simple fact that they had really bad weather in Russia this past year, and weather predictions for the new year look pretty grim, as well (and, sorry environmentalists, the predictions are for a lot of very cold weather). We can’t really do too much about the weather, but we can do something about this: the United States has 21.5% less agricultural land now than we had in 1950.

With a population double what we had back then, we’ve got vastly less agricultural land to farm on. We have steadily decreased our agricultural base for decades now – and here we are, about to have a global food crisis which could probably have been easily filled if America farmed the way it used to.

Outside of the actual pain this food crisis could cause – especially among the poorest and most vulnerable – there is also the practical effect on American wealth. By not producing as much food as we used to, we have that much less to sell on the global market – part of our trade deficit is caused by the fact that we are not the gigantic food exporter we used to be (in fact, we may end up being a net food importer soon, if not already). While people like to concentrate on high tech jobs, it must not be forgotten that America’s first impact on the world was our gigantic agricultural industry – we used to feed the world, now we can barely feed ourselves.

This is why I yammer on endlessly on the subject of production – the “make/mine/grow” thing. We have to get back to doing the hard work we used to do – it is the only way to wealth; it is the only way to restored American prosperity. We either get back to work, or we eventually die as a nation. It is really just that simple.

Done in 2 minutes and 2 seconds:

From Harris Interactive:

…Currently, two-thirds of Americans (67%) have a negative opinion of the job President Obama is doing while just over one-third (37%) have a positive opinion. This continues the president’s downward trend and he is now at the lowest job approval rating of his presidency.

These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 3,084 adults surveyed online between October 11 and 18, 2010 by Harris Interactive…

…While the president is at a low point, there is a political body with ratings much lower than his. Just one in ten Americans (11%) give Congress positive ratings on the job they are doing while nine in ten (89%) give them negative marks. While Congress may be under Democratic control, even four in five Democrats (81%) give them negative ratings…

Not at all where Obama and his Democrats want to be a week before the vote. Generally, these sorts of polling results bode very, very ill for the party in power. They are the sort of results where, once the votes are counted, phrases like “historic” and “unprecedented” are applied to the shellacking the ruling part takes…

From CNN:

California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina is in the hospital for an infection related to reconstructive surgery after her battle with breast cancer, Fiorina’s campaign announced…

Just part of her long battle with breast cancer, and if anyone can take it and bounce back, she’s the one.

WARNING: Obscenity in this video – it is worse than you thought.

Teachers are ok. Teachers union? An absolute blight on American education. All teacher union contracts should be canceled and no group associated with the current teachers unions should be allowed to engage in collective bargaining agreements with any American school district.

From Reuters via CNBC:

Litigation arising from foreclosure paperwork problems could be “very damaging” to the housing market, a top U.S. banking regulator said Monday.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp Chairman Sheila Bair said she did not believe legislation would be needed to address concerns over whether the paperwork was properly done so long as investigations show the issue was mostly “procedural.”…

Translation: “for goodness sake, if we make the banks actually do their job properly, our whole ‘extend and pretend’ game will crash and a score of big banks will go under. Don’t you hicks out there realize that only via government corruption are we keeping these banks afloat?”.

The problem here isn’t that people lost their homes unfairly – if you don’t pay your mortgage, you lose your house. People who have been foreclosed upon or who face it might be able to spin things out and live rent free for a while, but the plain fact of losing the house cannot be escaped. The problem here is that this mess will slow down foreclosures making banks keep the toxic loans on the books for longer than they can stand…and, even worse, sales of distressed houses will drop like a rock as title insurers back off any short or foreclosure sales because there are too many questions about who has title to the house. Ultimately, we could also see massive lawsuits from people who bought mortgage-backed securities and took a bath on them…

What the Banksters and Bureaucrats want is for this problem to go away – and go away very fast. The game they’re playing only works as long as everyone pretends there is no problem…as soon as someone notices the emperor has no clothes, the jig is up. We’ll see how successful they are…but I’m not counting on it as once lawyers get involved, easy resolution becomes impossible.

$45,000.00 for a puff piece on a blog?

Well-known mommy blogger Lyss Stern agreed to write a puff piece for an advertising supplement for the New York Observer to pay off a nearly $45,000 dental bill, then reneged on the deal, contends a New York lawsuit filed by a dental firm…

If you want your firm puffed, then I’m your man – I’ll undercut any blogger out there! Mad Mark’s Blog-O-Rama is open for business!

HAT TIP: Instapundit