One of the Festivus Miracles of American Journalism is that the Wall Street Journal is such a very good newspaper despite the daily presence of its editorial pages, which are run by a couple of brain-damaged wingnuts who would be unwelcome on AM talk radio, as callers. Today, one of these comical editors has typed up a wonderful economic theory about the current global recession which was caused by unmitigated over-leveraging of fanciful mortgage-based securities whose existence was encouraged by artificially cheap and unscrutinized credit and the resulting collapse of those securities’ values and the resulting credit crunch combined with the deeply intertwined decline of the real estate, construction, mortgage, investment and commodity markets, which was the primary and undisputed cause of the halt in consumer spending which has unarguably created a feedback loop of unemployment, debt default, foreclosures and negative economic activity all over the planet Earth: This was all actually caused by somebody not saying “Merry Christmas” at the mall! MORE »

At the Ottawa Herald of Franklin County, Kansas, even the guys who work the newspaper printing press can write a column for the “op ed” section. And proving once again that small-town papers are like blogs without the quality control, pressman Gary Sillett contributed a terrific “community viewpoint” about the upcoming presidential election.

“To elect Barack Obama to the highest office in the land would be nothing less than spitting on the graves of the victims of 9/11,” Sillett wrote last week. You know you want to read the rest. MORE »