Over the past year I’ve lost a whole bunch of weight.  Then there were times, like the past 2 weeks, when the scale said my weight was moving in the other direction.  I think I need a new scale.  This one seems very unreliable.  Don’t you agree?

Economics and politics have always mixed, so the response to S&P’s downgrade and Moody’s threat of a downgrade isn’t all that surprising.  Politicians have to say something, and it costs no political capital to shoot the messenger.  Connecticut Junior Senator Richard Blumenthal was quoted in The Patch this morning as saying:

“The downgrade of U.S. Treasury bonds by one of the rating agencies, S&P, certainly undermines and adds greater doubt about the credibility and integrity of that rating agency, and maybe some of the others.”

Treasury Secretary Geitner had the following response to S&P:

“S&P has shown really terrible judgment and they’ve handled themselves very poorly,” he said in an exclusive interview with CNBC. “And they’ve shown a stunning lack of knowledge about basic U.S. fiscal budget math. And I think they drew exactly the wrong conclusion from this budget agreement.”

At the same time, the New York Stock Exchange, the European exchanges, and the Asian exchanges all took a huge tumble on Monday, and I read that we’re not nearly out of the woods yet.  Pretty much the whole globe is selling off.  Our country owes trillions of dollars to China, whose government pretty much hates our guts.  I’m left scratching my very bald head.  Can anyone explain to me how S&P is to blame?

18 months ago my cholesterol was through the roof, and I was fat enough to provide my own gravitational field for the last 2 shuttle missions.  Much as I wanted to blame bad genetics and my wife’s good cooking, I found out that didn’t change anything.  I had to change.  55 pounds and 100 points of cholesterol later, things were better.  Then I slipped out of good habits into bad ones, and whadaya know?!  I need to make a change again.

I’m ready to listen to more than one proposal to get us out of this mess.  And I’m certainly no expert.  But I don’t think that S&P is to blame.

John Tusch is just a guy from Sandy Hook, CT.  The title is a quote he borrowed from a friend of his.