Congratulations to the Athuletics for their win today, sweeping the Twinkies. I felt bad for ol’ Brad Radke, a man who’s made the absolute most of his talent, but that’s baseball. That Haren kid’s fun to watch with that decrepit-wooden-rollercoaster delivery that herks and jerks then *BANG*…saw some wicked pitches from him today (yes, I blew off mein arbeit at precisely 3:05.)

Kenny Rogers is a top-drawer jerk, but I’m pulling for his bonehead ass to beat the hated Yankees tonight. I always hate the Yankees, but that hate’s just cranked to 11 in the playoffs. I normally only hate people like Chairman Mao and Ayatollah Khomeini like this, but for a short month, I feel the exact same way about The Golden Boys. Well, I don’t want them to die horrible deaths or anything like that, just to lose, and lose badly. Probably hate’s too strong a word — let’s go with disgusting. They disgust me, at 11. Lose, you bastards, lose…lose in a heart-breaking, soul-crushing, team-destroying way. You can use your bajillion dollar bills to wipe your tears away.

In mid-May with gasoline prices at $2.95 a gallon and rising, 15 percent of Americans listed high fuel prices as their top concern, outstripping terrorism. And much of the public seemed ready to vent its wrath on President Bush and the Republican-led Congress.

By early September, though, with the nationwide average at $2.73 a gallon and falling, only 5 percent of those polled said that the price of gas was the single most important issue, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Since then, the price of gasoline has fallen even further, now down about 70 cents a gallon from its peak in August — with only a month before the elections.

Coincidence?

A lot of Americans don’t think so.

This is one disadvantage of farming out all of our blue-collar jobs to 3rd-world countries and everybody else leaving the farm, and then diving 12 feet deep into a service- sector economy — most Americans don’t have Clue #1 about how markets and economies work. For example, there’s no mention of the off-shore discovery of up to 15 BILLION barrels of sweet, light crude. If the NIMBYs would ever open up the rest of the offshore drilling options, Lord only knows where we’d be. Well, the Lord knows, but I can make a guess…one hell of a lot closer to the energy independence that so many idiotic progressives whine about unknowingly.

But that’s no fun…you can’t sit around typing into the internet about George Bush, Rick Perry, and the rest of the Republican bastards manipulating the global petroleum markets. And then what would you do with all that time on your hands? My suggestion would be…watch some more Keith Olberman on the teevee.

According the Arabs, anyway:

The Bush administration’s effort to foster a bloc of moderate Arab states to stand against growing militancy in the Middle East has come up against a brick wall, with several close U.S. allies bluntly telling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday that they do not want to be pitted against other Arab governments and movements, according to senior Arab officials. The solution, the allies told Rice, lies with stronger U.S. leadership in solving the Arab-Israeli conflict.

During talks Tuesday in both Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Rice was confronted by friendly but firm pressure from eight Arab governments — Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain — to follow up on promises by President Bush to help achieve a two-state solution in the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. They also questioned whether the administration still has the energy or full commitment to pull off a solution to the Palestinian issue before Bush leaves office, officials said.

“stronger US leadership in solving the Arab-Israeli conflict” meaning “tell Israel to back off and give up.” Meaning, we’re going to sit on our fat plutocratic Jew-hating asses and do nothing…wait, not nothing…let the Palis, along with Hamas do our wetwork, until then. Damned if any of them are going to lift a finger, though, not when they can sit and bitch that a country half the world away isn’t doing enough.

I fall back to my King for a Day 2-State solution: America buys Mexico, and we give the Israelis a truly safe and sound Israel (part of that “never again” ancient-history diplomacy, you might recall, though it certainly sounds quaint to some today) on one of the coasts. Yes, we will have to leave behind many, many historically & theologically important unremovable physicalities to bunch of barbarians, but we carry those in our hearts and our heads. Then, though, we can watch from afar as these tribal hellholes sink into a pit of their own making — truly the next New Africa. Probably a pit made radioactive by the Persians, as well. We can all sit around and jaw-jaw about the Dark-Yet-Glowing Peninsula, and college kids can hold marches with giant papier-mache puppets for President Clinton, Jr. to stop the internecine genocide.

Via the Belgravia Dispatch…