There have been prettier weeks than this one.

If 2008’s first week celebrated change, the second week reminded us that change isn’t going to come any time soon. It’ll be a long haul, and most likely not a pretty one.

* The now-notorious “Obama Is A Muslim Spy - Honest!” e-mail made its rounds during that critical 36 hour window before New Hampshire. Golly gee; what an amazing coincidence. I suppose it has nothing to do with the disappearance of Obama’s 10 point lead over Hillary and the 18% of voters who said they decided on the last day. That the only source we have ever discovered for this abomination was a Clinton staffer is, I’m sure, also just a coincidence.

Fortunately, the new version of the e-mail has a link to snopes.com - included above, too - so that people can click on it and find out its false. Any simple internet search would do this. So that means, only idiots who would fail to check the facts on something before turning it decisive belief and action will succumb. Unfortunately, that seems about 70% of America.

* Iran harassed us with speedboats. Considering we’re the most powerful army in the world, one would think we would tell them that if they did it again, we would blow their zippy little boats into zippy little bits without so much as a “fare thee well.” Instead, Bush and the GOP candidates insisted it was proof Iran was “a threat.” Yes; clearly, Iran was not just trying to poke at us to show it can make us roar like a big, tender giant. Clearly, Iran’s next speedboat assault will render us more vulnerable, more broken, than even the colossal Red Army of the 70s could not.

This was just another incident that made me hang my head in a combination of shock, shame and prayer. I miss the 80s. Do any of you all remember when we actually acted like the invincible superpower we are?

* In what is, in fact, an odd coincidence, Bush visited Auschwitz the day that a German Events Planner put out a shirt protesting smoking bans that features a Star of David patch - a la the Nazis - with the word ’smoker’ in it.

* Meanwhile, the most important story went largely ignored - as usual. The real imminent crisis is not Global Warming or illegal immigration. These make great boogeymen, but are localized and manageable compared to the immense trouble caused by our economic policies of the last eight years - which are, if you’ll allow me an extension of metaphor, four-hundred foot tall, radioactive chickens looking to come home to roost:

The economic crisis is that we have been taking this country’s real wealth and turning it into debt, and then selling that debt overseas.

In short, this tale begins with the tech bubble bursting. Our surplus teeters on becoming a defecit. Bush’s solution is to significantly lower taxes for the highest tax brackets. This in turn encourages corporations to expand, buying new development on credit. Meanwhile, everyone in the lower tax brackets is given a rebate and told to spend more. Americans do, buying more goods that the expanded corporations are producing. Corporations cut jobs to make themselves more competitive in the market, and then reinstate jobs at lower wages after they have expanded in their holdings. The result is a rise, then drop, in unemployment but an overall drop for salaries for middle class and lower class earners. This means more middle and lower class using more credit, while big business uses more credit to expand and so to produce goods they can sell to the middle and lower classes.

All the while, places like China and India are producing those goods, while at the same time China and nations like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are selling American consumers and businesses debt. They do this so that we can continue to buy the goods we pay them to produce cheaply.

Only now, chips are starting to be cashed. People are starting to think that maybe high-interest loans and maxed out credit cards wasn’t the way to go. Maybe they needed the tax cuts, and fiscal responsibility. But already, major banks like Citibank and Countrywide have sold these peoples’ debt to overseas, so that they can hike their market share and use those Fed tax cuts to buy their business larger.

Something’s going to give. Today, as those above links show, the market plunged and Citibank, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, offered itself up to Beijing. The house of cards is not going to be pretty when it falls, but how it’ll stay up is anybody’s guess.