Good Tuesday, All.  We did not watch the debate.  I am really tired of the whole mess.  "Undecided" is definitely not a word that describes us.  We decided after we saw the Repthuglican field.  None of them offered us any reason to vote for them and all too many reasons to vote against them.  I will see what the internet sites have on the debate.  However, I think Obama won with one comment the news showed this morning countering Romney's argument that our Navy is smaller than it was in 1917.  Obama noted that we also have fewer horses and bayonets also because the nature of the military has changed.  I sat there after the quip thinking about the various changes and listed several in my mind (decline of the battleship, rise of the submarine, rise of the aircraft carrier, and the reliance on nuclear missiles) before the subsequent commercial was over.  It left me with the impression that Romney is a damned good parrot--he accepts and repeats nice tidbits of information from his advisors without reflecting on them.  I am not voting for parrot in chief any more than chameleon in chief.

I saw something interesting on the Nightly Business Report (on our public TV station).  I noticed that many of the economic pundits have puzzled over the disappearance of the so-called retail investor--the small individual investor.  Some of the remarks have been absolutely disparaging of the small investors claiming they lack the stomach to stick out the downs of the markets while showing an undue enthusiasm for the ups.  One of the latest themes is that such investors got badly burned in the market bubbles over the last fifteen years and are now very shy about jumping back in.  But last night's commentator had a bit different take: if the small investor is shy about the markets, perhaps they have good reason.  He cited figures that show 20% of the CFOs of top companies confess that they 'cook' their books and engage in accounting manipulations that, though legal, also make it very difficult to accurately evaluate the company.  In such an opaque environment how can anyone make an intelligent decision to invest.

Tom Englehardt has a good take on Election 2012.  If American Politics has been 'super-sized' and is now suffering from obesity, I am suffering from indigestion.  We have a very old saying: we have the best politicians money can buy.  Well the neither part of that is true any more.  We don't have the best politicians and they can no longer be bought--only rented, and not for a very long term.