You know that you want it...

My immediate take:

1. Right tone. Making America "great again" has resonance (albeit slightly backhanded). Obama staked out the optimistic position in contrast with Republicans' pessimism--generally a good strategy.

2. Clarity, at least relative to the cloudiness of his past 2.5 years. He pretty clearly delineated the ideological differences.

Investor Jeremy Grantham, well known for years and around the world (he manages more than $100 billion) has recently come around to the idea that some mortgage debt forgiveness might be necessary.  Given that Grantham invests in bonds from time to time, this is amazing stuff.  Bond investors hate the idea of debt forgiveness.  They usually prefer "debt repayment at all costs, or I get to take your stuff."  I recommend reading Grantham's latest letter to clients, which you can find here, or perhaps my

I spent a lot of the summer driving U-Haul trucks instead of blogging, so I didn't keep up with the early Republican jostling. Tonight, I'm going to do something useful with my time, so watching the Republican debate is out of the question. But the New York Times published a great piece about the Republican's political situation three months back. It simply didn't use the words "republican" or politics. It was a piece about movie studios and Comic Con.

Slightly late and exceedingly risky but why the heck not.

In the Wall Street Journal article, Can the World Still Feed Itself?, Austrian Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, portrays genetically-modified (GMO or GM) crops as the hero, and food-for-fuel as the villain in the effort to feed six, seven, or even nine billion planetizens:
 

New Dream Mini-Views: Visualizing a Plenitude Economy

from Center for a New American Dream on Vimeo.

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe.

In his September 3, 2011 NY times OpEd, The Limping Middle Class, Robert Reich continues to make a now-familiar argument that only John and Jane Doe can prop up our floundering economy.
 

When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without sinking ever more deeply into debt — which, as we’ve seen, ends badly. An economy so dependent on the spending of a few is also prone to great booms and busts. The rich splurge and speculate when their savings are doing well. But when the values of their assets tumble, they pull back. That can lead to wild gyrations. Sound familiar?

It's college football season, and that means corruption and scandal. (Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about that corruption.) We've actually gotten to the point where Sports Illustrated, not the Chronicle of Higher Education but Sports Illustrated, has called for a major university football team to be disbanded.

This is the start of the Labor Day weekend.  We've been celebrating Labor Day since 1882,  an amazing feat considering all those bastards throughout these long years who would like to strike from our memories the fact that it was labor unions who started the whole thing. 

In a stormy meeting on Thursday, Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives rejected Speaker John Boehner's compromise with President Obama over the schedule of the President's speech to a joint session of Congress.

The White House had sent Mr. Boehner a request for President Obama to address Congress on the evening of Wednesday, September 7. Such requests are considered routine and have been approved 47 times since 1962 without challenge.

But in the volatile political climate of 2011, nothing can be taken for granted. Many Tea Party-affiliated Republicans had campaigned against wasteful speechmaking in the 2010 election, and 216 had signed a "No New Speeches" contract sponsored by Grover Norquist's fundraising organization, Americans for Talk Reform.

"Americans don't need more speeches," argued House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in an hour-long discourse from the House floor last week, "They want the folks in Washington to shut the heck up."

In, Has Peak Oil Come To The Non-Opec World? Maybe., Forbes advises investors that the traditional Western Big Oil firms have peaked, and to look elsewhere for profits from new production: