Hope you all are having a good Wednesday.  We get to continue our pleasant late August weather in mid-October.  It has stretched to a few more days than originally predicted but the next week is supposed to be cooler and wetter.  I have to wash down the patio now that all of the plants have been pulled--except for those that I want to overwinter.  The last ones I pulled yesterday surprised me.  I forgot I had put the plants into cut-down plastic juice containers that I sank into the soil of the container.  I hoped that would provide the plants with protected soil where they wouldn't have competition from nearby plants.  It worked very well.  The lemon balm and marigolds were in with tomatoes and both sets of plants produced nicely.  Next year I think I will try the same but with the cardboard oatmeal containers instead.  Those decompose over the growing season.  I also need to clean and oil my tools for the winter--before I put them away till spring.

Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post has some very good comments on the 2012 elections and the faith the electorate has in whether the results will change anything.  Evidently we don't have much faith that things will substantially change or that anything that changes will substantially improve our economic lives.  I agree totally.

I found this disgusting item at Crooks & Liars.  I don't know which sickens me most: the city government calling the process of loosing 1400+ street lights for failing to pay its utility bill, replacing 200 with more efficient lights and calling the process 'lighting improvement' or the cop who offered to make sure a business was not broken into (after the owner had already had a roof-top air conditioning unit stoled after the lights on his street came down) if he got paid $650 every two weeks.   A case of colossal mismanagement compounded by official misconduct and extortion.

But then Susie Madrak's piece (also at Crooks & Liars) clearly ups the ante on official misconduct and extortion.  We have gone back over 100 years in time to when the police and army units regularly turned out to protect the well connected business owners from protesters, peaceful or otherwise.  Often peaceful was only in the eyes of the cop or soldier and anyone anywhere near the vicinity of a protest could be clubbed into insensibility without cause or accountability.  Or perhaps only 50 years ago during protests over the Vietnam War.  We have really come a long way, haven't we, baby?

I am sure we all believed the statement Merkel and Sarkozy put out over the weekend that they had a plan to solve the European Union's fiscal problems (to be announced later).  The markets evidently liked it a lot.  Me?  I am a unrepentant skeptic.  Especially when I read stories like this one found by way of a link at Naked Capitalism.  Why should Hungary raise warning bells?  Because of its connection to a Eurozone bank which has links to other Eurozone banks which Merkel and Sarkozy have basically promised to backstop to infinity and beyond.  (Too bad Buzz Lightyear can't take on this problem.)  I wonder how many problems have been invisible because the country involved isn't part of the Eurozone?