According to Rasmussen, consumer confidence is now in the little crawl-space beneath an abandoned motel in Death Valley.
But it’s probably better in the U.S. than it is today in Paris, where the news this afternoon has been all over the story of explosives found in the loo at Printemps, a big Paris department store on the boulevard Haussmann. The Afghan Revolutionary Front took the bow. Paris’s grands magasins (Galeries Lafayette, Le Bon Marché, et al) are all on alert, and shoppers have not been calmed by the nearly simultaneous arrest of seven “Islamists” in the suburbs. The seven aren’t linked to the explosives. Instead, they’re linked to “jihadist” groups — well, kind of like the sort of people who hide explosives behind the john as their part in their holy-revolutionary war thing.