At the risk of sounding like Michael Winner, I went to dinner on Wednesday night with a number of American gentlemen.  They are all nice enough blokes with level enough heads and decent enough brains.  But the conversation was a bit distressing at times.

“What do you think of Palin?” one (an ex-pat marooned in Blighty for the time being) asked another (a Californian resident just visiting this planet).

“You remember David Lee Roth’s Hot For Teacher?  She’s got that kind of sexy teacher/librarian thing going on.  A real MILF.  She’s got a great rack.”

“But as a candidate [you think] she’s crap, right?”

“Oh, yeah.  But you can only vote McCain, right?  I mean, Obama…?!”

“Sure, sure, but you know – it’s a bit worrying: I mean, McCain could die at any minute…”

“True.  But she’s hot.  I’m for McCain.”

Inside, I wept for two and a half hours.

In her acceptance speech to the Republican Party convention, Governor Palin quoted a writer called Westbrook Pegler:

We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.

It seems Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not particularly impressed with the sexy librarian’s choice of reading matter.

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies.”

It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.

Still, cracking tits, eh?

In other news…

[Arrivederci Gordon] sought… to show that he was committed to reform of the City and tackling the financial crisis. Keen to re-establish his authority ahead of Labour’s annual conference, Brown said: “We are cleaning up the financial system where there have been problems and we are going to continue taking whatever action is necessary so we have a stable financial system.”

Forgive my naivety but how can the man who was, er, in charge of “the financial system” from May 1997 to June 2007 re-establish anything by admitting that “there have been problems” in that system, that it is not “stable” and that there is a need for it to be “cleaned up”?

Meanwhile…

If I place a bet with Ladbrokes and Ladbrokes refuses to pay out when I win, I cannot enforce that gaming contract because it is a long-established principle of English law that permitting the enforceability of gambling deals would be A Bad Thing – floodgates, public policy, that sort of thing.

However, if I decide to sell shares THAT I DON’T OWN to someone, in the hope that I’ll be able to buy them back later at a lower price (ie place a bet), I can earn gazillions in bonuses in the City if my luck holds.  This noble art is called short-selling and is what 21st Century GB plc is built upon.

So…

Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, said: “While we regard short-selling as a legitimate investment technique in normal market conditions, the current extreme circumstances have given rise to disorderly markets. As a result, we have taken this decisive action, after careful consideration, to protect the fundamental integrity and quality of markets.”

However…

[The] clampdown came as early signs suggested that fears that HBOS had been targeted in a frenzy of short selling earlier this week appeared to be misplaced.

We’re in safe hands.

OR

Doomed.  Doomed.  We’re all doomed.

You decide.