Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Another unpleasant day for market-watchers: “Wall Street’s angst over the ongoing fallout from the credit crisis made for a turbulent end to a volatile week Friday — stocks tumbled, soared and then turned south again as investors tried to assess the dangers faced by the country’s biggest mortgage financiers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Dow Jones industrial average, which traded down more than 250 points in the session, briefly moved into positive territory Friday before resuming its decline. The blue chips also fell below 10,000 11,000 for the first time in two years before recovering.”
* Oh, and the price of a barrel of oil topped $147 for the first time, too.
* A large ice plate is “hanging by its last thread” to Antarctica.
* NYT: “Turkish police have now detained 10 suspects in the armed attack on the United States Consulate on Wednesday that killed six people, the governor of Istanbul said Friday.”
* There’s been a lot of buzz about this story, but the Bush Administration is denying earlier reports: “It looks like the story that the Bush administration pressured the German government to nix an Obama speech at Berlin’s historic Brandenburg Gate is getting shakier. The Treasury Department has just told me that stories in the German press saying that a Treasury official expressed open hostility to the idea are ‘not an accurate reflection of what he said.'”
* More on this tomorrow: “The Bush administration today disavowed its own proposal to seek comment on whether the government should regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, declaring that the proposed approach would be unworkable.”
* Good: “The Bush administration was dealt a setback on Friday in its efforts to keep records of White House visitors under wraps when an appeals court refused to throw out a lawsuit seeking access to the material. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that it would be premature to consider reversal of a lower court ruling last December that the White House visitor logs were public records, and that the administration should stop withholding them from scrutiny by outside groups.”
* The president apparently intends to veto the just-passed Medicare bill. It’s a fight against congressional Democrats that Bush is almost certain to lose.
* Interesting: “The chief prosecutor of the Internationals Criminal Court will seek an arrest warrant Monday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, charging him with genocide and crimes against humanity in the orchestration of a campaign of violence that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the nation’s Darfur region during the past five years, according to U.N. officials and diplomats.”
* Lawrence Lessig thinks the netroots are overreacting on FISA: “The hysteria that has broken out among we on the left in response to Obama’s voting for the FISA compromise was totally predictable. Some more cynical types might say, so predictable as to be planned. National campaigns are dominated by people who believe a leftist can’t be elected to national office. That means events that signal a candidate is not a leftist are critical for any election to national office.”
* Here’s a concept I can get behind: “Media Trolls.”
* Republicans are finding new and creative ways to lie about the Chinese drilling for oil in Cuban waters.
* It was only a matter of time before conservative media personalities began telling us how right Phil Gramm is about the strength of the economy. Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes is just a little ahead of the curve.
* Vermonters may be pleased to learn that the award-winning Candleblog has been redesigned. It’s fancy, now.
* And finally, let’s just say Fox News isn’t having a very good year: “Fox News desperately needs a fact checker in its graphics department. MSNBC’s David Shuster caught this gem from a Fox report on the Iranian missile tests. The graphic that Fox used to identify the Strait of Hormuz put the strait in the wrong location, and misspelled ‘strait.’ For good measure, the Fox reporter also mispronounced ‘Hormuz.'”
Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.