I don’t know which, myself:

The swine flu pandemic could kill millions and cause anarchy in the world’s poorest nations unless £900m can be raised from rich countries to pay for vaccines and antiviral medicines, says a UN report leaked to the Observer.

The disclosure will provoke concerns that health officials will not be able to stem the growth of the worldwide H1N1 pandemic in developing countries. If the virus takes hold in the poorest nations, millions could die and the economies of fragile countries could be destroyed.

Health ministers around the globe were sent the warning on Thursday in a report on the costs of averting a humanitarian disaster in the next few months. It comes as officials inside the World Health Organisation, the UN’s public health body, said they feared they would not be able to raise half that amount because of the global downturn.

If this isn’t panic-mongering, then we need to really get on this…too many lives are at stake, and in addition to the loss of lives would be the massive disruption of global civilization. In my view, better safe than sorry – time to tap TARP and throw some money at this problem, rather than the problem of bankers. If it is panic-mongering, then we’ll have wasted a bit more than a billion dollars…which Congress can waste in five minutes, on a good day.

I’ve heard, over the months, both the worst-case and nothing-to-worry-about scenarios on this pandemic – while I’ve tended towards the nothing-to-worry-about, I can’t help but notice the similarities between this outbreak and the 1918-19 flu…and while we in the wealthy nations will get off lighter than the poorer nations, the fact remains that a great deal of what we use in our nation comes from the labor of people in poor nations…given how stupid we’ve been about outsourcing our hard work, we now lack the capacity to look after ourselves in a crisis. And this knowledge just reinforces my better-safe-than-sorry approach.

For those of you who are not Christians, if you ever wanted to know just what makes us tick:

To holy people the very name of Jesus is a name to feed upon, a name to transport. His name can raise the dead and transfigure and beautify the living. – Venerable John Henry Newman

It really works like that – and its not just spiritual…we Catholics hold to a much more immediate, in-the-flesh view of this in the Eucharist. Right there, right next to us, all the time and everywhere.

To win would be to hold the seat, but this could also be a sign that the GOP is starting a resurgence in the northeast:

Republican Kelly Ayotte leads Democrat Paul Hodes by eight points in an early look at New Hampshire’s 2010 race for the U.S. Senate.

The first Rasmussen Reports survey of the race to fill the seat being vacated by retiring GOP Senator Judd Gregg shows Ayotte ahead 46% to 38%.

Five percent (5%) of New Hampshire voters prefer some other candidate, and 12% are undecided.

Ayotte, the state’s attorney general from 2004 until her resignation in July, captures 81% of the Republican vote, and Hodes, a two-term member of the U.S. House, earns the identical number (81%) of Democratic votes. Among voters not affiliated with either party, Ayotte leads by 14 points.

The independents are the key number here – lost them by 14 points, and you can’t win. From all polling that I’ve seen, independents are starting to swing back to the GOP out of dismay for the harsh, leftist politics emanating from the Democrat Congress and White House. They voted for moderate hope and change, they’ve got hard left, hard ball, corruption-as-usual politics…and the Democrats might pay a very high price next year for this failure to live up to their campaign rhetoric.

Crucial to the debate over Obamacare:

For an uneducated, unsophisticated rube and former governor from a backwater state, Sarah Palin sure can drive a debate. With prospects for passage of his sweeping overhaul of the American health care delivery system fading with every speech, President Barack Obama is making it increasingly clear that Palin will be recognized, for good or ill, as perhaps the most prominent single political figure responsible for stopping it in its tracks.

It’s a remarkable story. A failed vice-presidential candidate and resigned governor — unfairly viewed by many as a cruel joke – reached from beyond the political grave her elitist critics prematurely dug for her and her political future to thwart a popular president prematurely regarded by the same elite that shunned her as perhaps the most gifted politician this nation has ever produced. If Sarah Palin were a sitting governor, a failed presidential candidate, or even a state legislator, her influence in the health care debate would not be as unexpected. It is the fact that she is a private citizen, completely out of politics save for a small political action committee, that makes this story unique.

How did she do it? That’s where the story gets even more remarkable.

There were no public appearances or speeches, no glitzy ad campaigns, no publicity tours, no interviews in the mainstream press or any new media outlet. Sarah Plain killed health care reform with a posting on her Facebook page, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and an exquisite sense of timing.

“Death Panels” did it – and I know our liberals still yank their hair in frustration…there was no such thing, they assert. After all, you can comb through the whole series of proposals and never find the phrase “death panel” mentioned. And that, to the liberals, is the end of it…its sort of like their assertion that no one is pro-abortion because no one actually says they are pro-abortion. But just as there are pro-abortion people, so were there “death panels” in the health care reform proposals, disguised as various commissions and committees which would oversea what coverage plans were to provide. And Sarah Palin’s phrasing was crucial to turning the debate firmly against Obama and his Democrats.

Now, the Palin might be out of the running for President – the left smeared her as a dunce, much as they once smeared Dan Quayle as a dunce, even though he was vastly smarter than Al Gore; and that smear might stick. Its hard to overcome public prejudices – it can be done, but its hard. The best person at it, ever, was Ronald Reagan. We’ll have to see if Palin can develope Reaganesque ability to re-shape public perceptions. But, be that as it may, Palin has shown why she rose so far and so fast – and still has a shot at the White House in 2012: she’s very, very smart.

And she’s made the left jump to her tune – that, in and of itself, will provide satisfaction when set against the slanders the left has launched against her.

Doesn’t surprise me at all:

Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday has been in the media game for a long time now. He’s reported good news and bad news about both Democratic and Republican presidents, and the White House staffs took most of the bad news in stride. They knew Wallace was just doing his job.

Not Barack Obama and his White House. The president snubbed Wallace and Fox News in his flurry of visits to Sunday news shows tomorrow, and last night, Wallace told Fox colleague Bill O’Reilly that Obama’s team is just as petty as their boss.

“These guys, everything is personal. I gotta tell you, everything,” Wallace said. “They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

It was all supposed to be so easy for them – Obama in the White House, large Congressional majority, a cheer leading MSM, leftist groups being put on the government dime…the opposition was not supposed to be able to do anything. We haven’t stopped them, of course – and, in fact, we can’t stop them: we don’t have the votes…but we have caused them serious pain and the longer this goes on, the worse it gets for them. Remember, if the big ticket items aren’t done before Thanksgiving, they won’t get done before January of 2011 because no one in the House, especially, is going to want to vote on controversial issues next year (and, in fact, they’re already afraid of voting on them, this year).

And now we get Wallace saying they are taking it personal – which is a sure sign of both executive weakness and lack of ability to figure out what to do, next. No one is really minding the store over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: the President seems fixated on endless campaign stops interspersed with flying visits to foreign lands to denounce America; the First Lady is acting like an Empress; the staff seems to be heading in six directions at once…the change from Bush to Obama is quite stunning. Heck, even Clinton’s relatively slip-shod operation is looking like a model of efficiency compared to Obama’s crew.

Can they pull it together? Perhaps – but by the time they do, the damage might already be done.

Maybe the mattress is the best place for money, after all?

The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. says she is “considering all options, including borrowing from Treasury,” to replenish the dwindling fund that insures bank deposits.

“I never say never,” FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair told an audience at Georgetown University Friday.

Bair’s remarks go beyond what she said just three weeks ago when asked about tapping the Treasury after the fund that insures regular deposit accounts up to $250,000 hit its lowest point since 1992, at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis. “Not at this point in time,” she said on Aug. 27.

The FDIC estimates bank failures will cost the fund around $70 billion through 2013. Ninety-two banks have failed so far this year. Hundreds more are expected to fall in coming years largely because of souring loans for commercial real estate.

The FDIC’s fund has slipped to 0.22 percent of insured deposits, below a congressionally mandated minimum of 1.15 percent. The $10.4 billion in the fund at the end of June is down from $13 billion at the end of March, and $45.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008.

More failures and less payments in to the fund – the FDIC, of course, only works as long as only a few banks per year fail. As we’ll probably have more than 100 fail this year, and probably as many next year, this is the “push comes to shove” time for the FDIC…and it has failed.

Jim Treacher has tracked down the most important story of 2009 – just who is the Boob Czar?

I’m kind of out of position until Saturday afternoon, or so – have at it while I’m gone…and remember, trolls, the Monitors are still on the job.

The story – from The Washington Examiner:

Reuters reports an interesting nugget in the wake of President Barack Obama’s decision to grant Vladimir Putin his wish and kill the Eastern European missile shield:

Shortly after the pullback on the shield programme was announced, Russia’s government said Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would meet several U.S. executives on Friday from firms including General Electric, Morgan Stanley as well as TPG, one of the world’s largest private equity firms

General Electric may be the company with the closest ties to the Obama administration (if not, GE is second only to Goldman Sachs), and here we see the company benefiting from an abrupt foreign policy change made by President Obama. But GE isn’t the only company benefiting. Reuters paints the broader picture:

“U.S. companies have arguably lost out to some European companies in joint ventures, and better diplomacy will likely improve the chances for investors in the strategic sectors of the Russian economy,” said Carlo Gallo, senior Russia analyst at London-based consultancy Control Risks.

GE CEO Jeff Immelt sits on Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and GE owns MSNBC, the network famously friendly to Obama.

Obama got some ‘splainin’ to do…

Do keep in mind that I’m predicting the government will tell us that we’re in positive growth for Q3, 2009 – and I expect this to continue at least through Q2, 2010…with an outside chance it might go all the way through Q1, 2011. But I’m also saying that its complete BS – its just shuffling money around. Here’s an excellent take which tracks with my views:

…We see more than 100% of GDP growth as completely dependent on government(s) spending.

The Federal Housing Administration has issued more than a trillion dollars in mortgages this year, picking up where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac left off (they really haven’t stopped either). Delinquency rates are approaching 17%.

Real GDP may be positive for the quarter, but when the government is involved there are lots of shenanigans.

For example, we’ve heard it plans to deduct the cash rebate for cars from the sales price, thus lowering the GDP deflator and artificially raising the reported real GDP number.

Senseless…

…When the market realizes that the Fed can’t create inflation (a full monetization of the majority of debt; something that would make even Ben blink), it’ll see that the S&P 500 is really trading at 20 times earnings that are not growing.

It’ll realize that all we’ve done is actually increase the overall debt in the system with massive stimulus and spending.

It’ll see the risk in stocks as extremely high.

Its what I expect, too – and my prediction is March of 2010 is when the proverbial poop will hit the fan. It might come sooner than that – the upcoming Christmas shopping season looks to be a disaster, and as that bad news comes home it might start the renewed slide in stocks right after Thanksgiving. On the other hand, Obama and Co might manage to weave and dodge (and borrow and print) their way through for a while longer…but eventually the truth comes out: we can’t spend our way to wealth, and when you’re broke the worst thing you can do is borrow more money.

Credit is contracting; incomes are falling, home prices continue to slide (in spite of some alleged stats to the contrary…my house is probably worth $153,000.00…three months ago, it would have fetched about $187,000.00; all around the country, this is what is happening…especially in FL, NV, CA and AZ), corporate insiders continue to bail out of stocks, unemployment continues to grow…its called a Depression. It can be fixed – but not by Obama’s warmed over New Deal.