We need you this very minute, Sarah Palin!

U.S. stock index futures were tumbling all night as I found it hard to sleep with Cable Channel 046 (CNBC in Ocean Shores, Washington) blaring continuously at the foot of my bed last night. As the bankruptcy filing of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers and cascading fears about the stability of other major financial institutions were rattling global markets--including a buyout of the venerable Merrill Lynch assets to Bank of America, it looked mighty like the stock market woes of those years just prior to my birth back in the late 1920's and early 1930's.

And to think I only learned what the heck Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were all about two or three weeks ago ...

I guess it would be unamerican to say that the combination of Big Oil and the Credit Card companies' stranglehold on the Free market and capitalism is finally causing major hits on Wall Street these days ... so I'll just say that something is certainly wrong and it's not Iraq's insurgent factions and it's not Russia's incursion into Georgia ...

It's not even Osama bin Laden, at least not this morning!