Cheat Sheet

The biggest drop in retail sales in three years and continuing doubts about the bank bailout resulted in a drubbing on Wall Street, with the Dow plunging 733.08 to 8,577.91, and the S&P dropping nine percent. Exxon Mobil and Chevron were big losers with eight percent drops as crude fell below $75 a barrel for the first time in a year; Morgan Stanley shed 15 percent; and Wal-Mart sagged six percent on news that chain store purchases declined 1.2 percent in September. "A big chunk of our economy is in recession right now," Tom Werth, senior investment officer at Chemung Canal Trust Co., told Bloomberg. "There's fear the Christmas season is going to be miserable."

With less than a month until Election Day, it’s now or never for John McCain. Tonight’s debate, writes John Dickerson at Slate, “is McCain's last big chance to reach a wide national audience without the media filter.” McCain certainly has a lot to juggle: He needs to attack Obama without seeming like a bully while simultaneously firming up his own positions on the economy. “For McCain,” Dickerson writes, “Wednesday's debate comes with a degree of difficulty perhaps beyond the capacity of human achievement.”

Long security lines at the airport are supposed to be for safety. But in the new Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg says they “are almost entirely for show—security theater is the term of art.” In a hilarious piece, Goldberg exposes our airports’ terrifying security gap. Goldberg’s inventory of smuggled items includes pocketknives, matches, cigarette lighters, rope, nail clippers, toothpaste, bottled water, box cutters, and a Beerbelly. In an attempt to get caught, Goldberg enters security with a fake boarding pass, no ID, and an Osama Bin Laden T-Shirt. “All right, you can go,” the TSA guard tells him. “But let this be a lesson for you.”

Election Day is still nearly a month away, but Barack Obama is off to a running start. The indispensable Nate Silver looks at polling numbers of early voting in five swing states and finds that Obama leads by an average of 23 points. Early voters broke for Bush in 2000 and 2004, and while “early voters tend to be your stauncher partisans rather than your uncommitted voters,” the numbers “imply that Obama is quite likely to turn out his base in large numbers.”

Shock photo in The Daily Telegraph: Colin Powell, dressed in his trademark power suit, losing himself on the dance floor. His index fingers are pointed to the sky, and his mouth is ajar as if prompted by a dentist to open wide. To what do we owe this treat? The occasion was Africa Rising, a benefit in which Powell was joined by Christina Aguilera, Seal, and the Nigerian musician Olu Maintain. After giving a speech earlier in the evening, Powell took the stage, and according to the Telegraph’s account, “seemed at ease as he treated the crowds to moves from the popular African dance Yahoozee.” Powell’s previous public dancing had been confined to the diplomatic shuffle.

Chilling read from The Washington Times about the lengths Maryland is going to contain sex offenders on Halloween. The state is requiring that its 1,200 violent and child-sex offenders hang a sign with an orange pumpkin reading “No candy at this residence” on their doors. This is in addition to a law that already prohibits sex offenders from leaving their homes on the holiday. “Halloween provides a rare opportunity for you to demonstrate to your neighbors that you are making a sincere effort to change the direction of your life,” a letter accompanying the signs states. Or, if you’ve already made said effort, to remind them that you were, you know, a sex offender.

New theory about our economic turmoil: it was caused by pirates. You heard right. A British lecturer argues in a paper that modern corporations got their start on pirate ships during the "golden age of buccaneering": "Pirates elected their captain, voted on major decisions, and distributed their booty in roughly equal shares, and there is something in the idea that a pirate ship is the equivalent of a modern corporation." He continues, “These predatory voyages are the roots of modern venture capitalism, with these modern multi-national corporations out to get all they can get. That's the sort privateering that led to the Credit Crunch." The argument, Hayes admits, leads to troubling conclusions about modern capitalism. But there you go.

Comedy Central's fake-news revue keeps on expanding. The latest addition is Chocolate News, starring the comedian David Alan Grier. The sketch-comedy show appears to be more Colbert than Stewart, with the Grier playing "a pompous, potty-mouthed windbag who calls his program 'the only source for pure, uncircumcised realness from an Afrocentric perspective.'" The show hopes to take advantage of the recent boom in political sketch comedy, as well as recapture some of the spirit of Dave Chappelle, who left Comedy Central in 2005.

Art is supposed to be the universal language, but that language has its limit. The limit is apparently John Travolta. Travolta's upcoming flick, From Paris with Love, was supposed to film a scene in the Les Bosquets estate, where the Paris riots began three years ago, in order to show solidarity with the local people. It didn’t quite work out that way. Ten stunt cars were destroyed by fire. Local residents originally welcomed the project, but were upset by paltry pay and compensation. The production company said filming will be "suspended until tempers cool down," but officials expect it to be abandoned for good.

Matthew Lynn at Bloomberg has some bad news for new MBAs looking to make it big: Bankers are the new civil servants. The high-risk-high-reward days and their subsequent windfalls are over. "When you are working for a publicly owned utility, with no risk of bankruptcy," Lynn writes, "you can't expect to make anything more than a normal middle-class salary." Bankers can kiss bonuses goodbye and may have to exchange their posh corporate headquarters for office parks in (gasp!) "less fashionable parts of town." Lynn’s conclusion: "[T]he days of swaggering around the place as masters of the universe are over."

HBO continued its behind-the-scenes makeover yesterday, when producer Colin Callendar, a 20-year veteran who helped to guide HBO through its golden age, left the network. Callendar was, according to the Los Angeles Times, "responsible for HBO's ambitious, sophisticated and hugely expensive original movies," including miniseries like Angels in America and John Adams. But the large price tags of his productions—his upcoming WWII drama, The Pacific, cost over $200 million— had corporate executives worried about recouping their money in foreign sales and DVDs. Callendar plans to form his own company in 2009.

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan has been hospitalized with a broken pelvis. The 87-year-old Reagan is thought to have fractured her pelvis when she fell at her home last week. Fortunately, she is said to be in good spirits and surgery will not be required.

Blockbuster in The Washington Post: The paper reports today that the Bush administration secretly issued a pair of memos in 2003 and 2004 authorizing the CIA's use of waterboarding and other controversial interrogation techniques. The memos were requested by the CIA, "whose repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured al-Qaeda leaders." While details of meetings between administration officials have been reported, the documents represent the earliest tangible evidence of the Bush administration's consent for the harsh interrogations.