ANSWERING SUCH GOOGLE SEARCH QUESTIONS AS “Is it bad to have sex with your aunt?”

AS PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT THE HIROSHIMA/NAGASAKI ANNIVERSARIES, here’s a Bill Whittle Afterburner flashback: Jon Stewart, War Criminals & The True Story of the Atomic Bombs.

ANOTHER CALL FOR TIM GEITHNER TO RESIGN, this time from Sen. Rand Paul.

I’m guessing that the Tax Cheat Stamps guy would rather he stuck around, though . . . .

JOHN MCCAIN: Don’t Blame The Tea Party: “The fact is that the President never came forward with a plan.”

WANT TO LIVE TO 100? Just do whatever you want, and hope for the best.

THOUSANDS OF JOB OPENINGS unfilled in Japan.

THOUGHTS ON THE DEBT DOWNGRADE from the “little people.”

PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No ‘rock-em,’ no ‘sock-em’: What ails WaPo. “The ombudsman of the Washington Post, Patrick Pexton, weighs in today with platitudes and hang-wringing about the newspaper. He mostly misses the mark. . . . In his five or so months as ombudsman, Pexton hasn’t dared touch the electrified third rail about the Post, which one of his predecessors, Deborah Howell, gamely if belatedly addressed. That’s a decided lack of intellectual diversity in the Post’s newsroom.”

WHEN IT COMES TO CARS, Korea Is The New Japan.

CAN WASHINGTON DO ANYTHING ABOUT JOBS? They’re better at destroying them than at creating them.

TODAY ONLY: More than 85% off Tommy Bahama luggage.

GIVE IT TO HIM: My Sunday Washington Examiner column: Why The GOP Should Give Obama The Higher Taxes He Wants. Well, sort of . . . .

DANIEL MITCHELL: The Rahn Curve: We All Know Government Is Too Big, But Here’s The Evidence.

LIST: Countries With A Better Credit Rating Than The United States.

GOOD ADVICE: If You’re Going to Falsely Tell Cops a Guy Sexually Assaulted You, Don’t Get Caught on Camera Announcing Your Plans. Hey, I keep telling you about the importance of ubiquitous video.

And we sure are seeing a lot of false rape charges nowadays, after decades of being told that women don’t lie about rape.

BOSTON HERALD:

Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the nation’s credit rating gives House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan every right to say “I told you so.”

Even earlier this week when President Obama was taking his victory lap for the debt-ceiling compromise, Ryan was disclosing the cold, hard truths of the economic troubles that lie ahead — truths that a jittery Wall Street has been more than aware of.

In an oped column in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, the Wisconsin Republican reiterated, of course, that the president really has no budget plan. . . . The president knew then and knows now that his health care and welfare state agenda demand new and higher taxes, that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will continue to rise at unsustainable levels and that he has no plan for dealing with that.

In fact, when presented with options by his own debt commission appointees, Obama continued to be in denial.

How can you talk about priorities when you can’t even present a budget?

UPDATE: For whom the downgrade tolls. “The first reaction of the administration was not to blame the GOP, but to attack S&P’s math, as though a couple of trillion makes the difference in this context. My initial hypothesis was that the administration took this tack to try to scare the Moody’s and Fitch — the other major credit ratings agencies — away from following S&P into issuing downgrades. Certainly, there are real-world effects off a downgrade on interest rates, economic growth, and employment that would motivate the administration to this end. Upon further consideration, I would suggest the reactions against S&P have deeper ideological roots. . . . Perhaps in the future, community organizers will bus hoboes to chant outside the houses of credit agency employees. Or perhaps Big Labor will organize rallies on Wall Street to rail against the evil bond market. But such efforts will be largely futile. Moreover, the DNC and AARP are not going to waste money running issue advocacy ads against our creditors, even though it would be vaguely amusing to see them roll out actors dressed as aristocratic bond vigilantes for demonization. It might be easier to run ads attacking our largest creditor, China, but it is a fair bet that the PRC would not care all that much, either.”

JANET DALEY: If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth. “The idea that a capitalist economy can support a socialist welfare state is collapsing before our eyes. . . . That is the problem. So profound is its challenge to the received wisdom of postwar Western democratic life that it is unutterable in the EU circles in which the crucial decisions are being made – or rather, not being made.”

FINANCIAL MELTDOWN: In this grave crisis, the world’s leaders are terrifyingly out of their depth.

Certain years have gone down in history as great global turning points, after which nothing was remotely the same: 1914, 1929, 1939, 1989. Now it looks horribly plausible that 2011 will join their number. The very grave financial crisis that has hung over Europe ever since the banking collapse of three years ago has taken a sinister turn, with the most dreadful and sobering consequences for those of us who live in European democracies.

The events of the past few days have been momentous: the eurozone sovereign debt crisis has escaped from the peripheries and spread to Italy and Spain; parts of the European banking system have frozen up; US Treasuries have been stripped of their AAA rating, which may be the beginning of a process that leads to the loss of the dollar’s vital status as the world’s reserve currency.

There have been warnings that we may be in for a repeat of the calamitous events of 2008. The truth, however, is that the situation is potentially much bleaker even than in those desperate days after the closure of Lehman Brothers. Back then, policy-makers had at their disposal a whole range of powerful tools to remedy the situation which are simply not available today.

Out of bullets.

POLL: 67% Say Economy Causing Family Stress. “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of American Adults say the state of the economy is causing more stress on their family. That finding is up 10 points from this time last year.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Confidence Crashes Through Lows Set In 2008 Meltdown.

The IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index — usually a precursor to confidence gauges released later in the month — has plunged 13.5% to 35.8 with subcomponents off sharply.

These include readings on six-month outlook, personal finances and faith in federal policies. A reading above 50 signals optimism, below 50 pessimism.

The main index’s 35.8 reading was the lowest since the poll began in 2001. It took out even the low of 37.4 set during the summer of 2008, when the financial crisis exploded into the nation’s headlines.

It also stands well below the 44.4 level that marked the onset of the last recession. Since the start of this year, the index has cratered 31%. . . . In the past, strongly positive readings among Democratic respondents to the IBD/TIPP Poll have kept the index from falling sharply in recent months, even as the economy soured and the nation’s problem with its soaring debt became an issue to average Americans.

But that ended in August.

For the first time since President Obama was elected in November 2008, Democrats grew pessimistic about the economy, with their optimism dropping 17% from 54.7 to 45.3.

Uh oh.

MORE ON the U.N. gun treaty.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Christie’s “Crazies.”

Maybe Governor Christie ought to ask S.D. if sharia law concerns are “just crap.” We know “S.D.” only by her initials to protect her from further indignity. She is a Muslim woman from Morocco who was serially raped and beaten in New Jersey by the Muslim man to whom she was wed as a teenager — one of those arranged marriages common in Islamic cultures. A New Jersey judge declined to give her a protective order, though. Under sharia, a man cannot rape his wife: “A woman cannot carry out the right of her Lord til she carries out the right of her husband,” declares one relevant hadith (Ibn Majah 1854). “If he asks her to surrender herself she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel’s saddle.” Or, as S.D.’s husband translated this sharia tenet as he forced himself on her, “This is according to our religion. You are my wife, I [can] do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do.”

Based on this, the judge (who, thankfully, was later reversed) reasoned that the husband couldn’t be criminally culpable.

Read the whole thing.

SHUT UP, HE EXPLAINED (CONT’D): Wisconsin Democratic Party flak threatens to sic union bullies on independent news group.

Zeilinski’s email could easily be read as a threat to organize union demonstrators against Wisconsin newspapers that publish reporting provided to them by WisconsinReporter.com’s staff. And his vow to go after WisconsinReporter.com’s capitol media credentials is an obvious effort to silence a news organization with which he disagrees.

When WisconsinReporter.com asked Beth Bennett, executive director of the Wisconsin Newspapers Association, for comment on Zeilinski’s threats, she characterized them as “out there” and unlike anything she’s seen previously during her career in Wisconsin government and media.

With their power-base threatened, Wisconsin’s political establishment is cracking up. Expect to see the same sort of thing on the national level, as matters progress.

UPDATE: Moe Lane mocks: “Zielinski went, to be charitable about it, a little crazy at this point. After castigating the author of the piece and complaining that the original article made him and his party ‘look even smaller’ in the process, Graeme Zielinski went on to demonstrate that he was capable of making him and his party look smaller all on his own, via a direct threat. . . . Good job getting this story out into wider circulation, Zielinski. Particularly since people outside of Republican circles are lining up to politely ask you what the heck your party thought that it was trying to accomplish, here.”

It’s hard to get good goons nowadays.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Clarice Feldman on the crackup. “I have come to believe that the reactions I received represented a rage at the dying of all that which these men had embraced in the absolute certainty of the righteousness and soundness of their views, and their right to have them automatically accepted as the approved model for all right thinking people. . . . the elite liberal of a certain age is experiencing a major life crisis as the march of history leaves them as but rather laughable footnotes — believers hanging on to 20th century versions of phlogiston and spontaneous generation.”

DAVE PRICE: The Downgrade And Its Discontents.