Cheat Sheet

The Dow celebrated Columbus Day with a 936.42-point gain today, leaping an astonishing 11.1 percent to 9,387.61. The index's biggest ever one-day point gain snapped an eight-day losing streak described by The Wall Street Journal as "brutal" and came amid new international actions to shore up a teetering global economy. European and Asian markets also rebounded on a day that 29 of 30 Dow components posted gains, with General Electric the lone loser. Despite the colossal rally, many Wall Street veterans expect further economic thunderclouds over the next few months. "The danger here is that people will be lulled into the idea that a strong bull trend is now in place rather than the idea that the market is just bouncing off a short-term oversold condition," Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a trading and research firm in Greenwich, Conn., told The Journal.

Today in Slate, Christopher Hitchens chops away at John McCain with typical wit. “I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged,” he writes, “that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism.” Eh-hmm. “With McCain,” Hitch continues, “the ‘experience’ is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke.” The result is a surprise endorsement of Obama from the unabashedly pro-war Brit. “Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience.”

What goes down must come up, right? The Dow Jones has risen 6.3 percent so far today after central banks injected billions of dollars of liquidity into the financial system over the weekend. Markets abroad did even better: The German and French exchanges were up over 11 percent, while the British exchange was up 8.2 percent. The strength of today’s gains will be tested tomorrow, however, when credit markets reopen after the Columbus Day holiday. If they remain frozen, stocks will probably tumble once again.

Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a famous communist dissident, so it came as a bit of surprise when he was recently accused by the magazine Respekt of outing an American agent to Czech authorities in 1950. "I am totally astonished by something that I did not expect, about which I knew nothing only yesterday, and that did not happen. I did not know the man at all," the reclusive Kundera said in a statement to the Czech news agency CTK. But a Czech researcher claimed the story was extensively researched. “A murky and convoluted story has now accidentally surfaced,” he said. “It indicates there may be other reasons for his reclusiveness than we previously imagined."

With the Palin family genealogy now settled, Bristol’s fiancée Levi Johnston has disappeared back into Wasilla. Turns out, though, that Johnston is willing to speak with reporters who approach him on his driveway. Johnston insists that his marriage plans have nothing to do with presidential politics, and describes his experience at the Republican National Convention with a Palinesque eloquence: “At first, I was nervous. Then I was like, ‘Whatever.’” The 18-year-old has dropped out of high school so he can raise his kid and is going to work on the oil fields as an apprentice electrician. Johnston calls Obama “a good guy” but is rooting for McCain and Palin. "I just hope she wins," he said. "She's my future mother-in-law. She better win." Anyone sense a whiff of desperation?

For some time now, Roger Ebert has seemed like the great uncle of film criticism. But anyone who has written Ebert off should check out his blog over at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he spouts off on a wide-range of subjects, like creationism and the presidential debates. His latest gem is a defense of smoking in the movies. "Movies can't rewrite reality," Ebert writes, noting the growing taboo on cigarettes in popular culture. "If, by the time you're old enough to sit through a movie, you haven't heard that smoking is bad for you, you don't need a movie rating, you need a foster home." Ebert was partly inspired by a new postal depicting Bette Davis without her trademark cigarette.

This probably seemed like a lot better idea a month ago: LG announced today that it will join with Prada to release a new edition mobile phone before the end of this year. The latest fashion accessory is appealing, with a touch-screen and a slide-out keyboard, but with new smart phones forthcoming from Blackberry and Google and a price tag of 600 Euros, it’s unclear exactly who will buy it. In this economy, consumers may be better off waiting to see if a Sears phone hits the market.

As if John McCain needed more bad news, Barack Obama may be winning over a constituency that hits the 72-year-old Republican close to home: old people. Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old American nun living in Rome, has registered to vote for the first time since 1952 and she’s voting for Obama. “I've never met him,” she says, “but he seems to be a good man with a good private life.” Sadly, even a victory for her preferred candidate will not lure her home. “I am too old to go back to the U.S.,” Sister Gaudette says. “Life has changed too much.”

A venerable tradition came under fire yesterday, as the Brits considered a ban on free drinks for women. If that weren’t enough to shake up pub culture, also endangered were drinking games and beer and wine “tastings.” Government officials feel that Britain’s 24-hour drinking has not produced the “café culture” of the continent but rather round-the-clock overconsumption. One Mark Hastings, of the British Beer & Pub Association, snarled, “Government needs to wake up to the fact that five pubs a day are closing.”

Conservatives like to defend McCain's negative campaigning by pointing out that Obama, too, is playing in the mud. But Hendrick Hertzberg writes in this week's New Yorker that "there is no equivalence between the two campaigns." Hertzberg commends the Obama campaign's decision to remain silent on the Palin family's association with the Alaskan Independence Party and John McCain's former seat on the advisory board of an organization that was “a sort of clearing house for former Nazi collaborators, Central American death-squad leaders, and assorted international thugs." Obama's decision is not only honorable, but also wise: The McCain campaign's negative turn has been disastrous. "If McCain loses, or even if he wins," Hertzberg writes, "his campaign will be remembered as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, in which a hero is ruined through some terrible choice of his own."

What do you need to know about Andy Martin, the man who, in 2004, started the rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim? This sentence from a New York Times profile pretty much says it all: "He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of 'moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.'" Martin has run for public office including president, and one campaign set out "to exterminate Jew power." This is clearly a man with little shame, and yet even Martin, who says he now accepts Obama's Christianity, calls others' circulation of the Islam meme "scary."

The upside of a new Great Depression for American liberals is the possibility of a new New Deal. But Clive Crook warns in The Financial Times that any such political realignment is unlikely. "Circumstances will force the next president to be a fiscal conservative on matters other than temporary stimulus and financial stability," Crook writes. It's unclear how desirable government intervention in other industries is if one considers the root of the banking crisis as innovation run amok. "In which other industries," Crooks asks, "will curbing innovation—also known as market forces—strike governments or voters, in the US or anywhere else, as a good idea?"