Fear and loathing everywhere. The sky is falling. We’re all going to die.

• Richard Fuld ^[1], the disgraced head of Lehman Brothers, was punched in the face in the office gym amid the bank’s collapse. “He was on a treadmill with a heart monitor on. Someone was in the corner, pumping iron and he walked over and he knocked him out cold. And frankly after having watched [Mr Fuld's testimony to the committee], I’d have done the same too.”
• “Jim Cramer ^[2], the wildly animated cheerleader for the stock market, who on his popular television show tends to be more bullish than most analysts, retreated yesterday, urging stockholders to dump their holdings as quickly as possible. ‘Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market right now, this week,’ he said.”
• Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the Telegraph ^[3]:

During the past week, we have tipped over the edge, into the middle of the abyss. Systemic collapse is in full train. The Netherlands has just rushed through a second, more sweeping nationalisation of Fortis. Ireland and Greece have had to rescue all their banks. Iceland is facing an Argentine denouement. The US commercial paper market is closed. It shrank $95bn last week, and has lost $208bn in three weeks. The interbank lending market has seized up. There are almost no bids. It is a ghost market. Healthy companies cannot roll over debt. Some will have to sack staff today to stave off default. As the unflappable Warren Buffett puts it, the credit freeze is “sucking blood” out of the economy. “In my adult lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as fearful,” he said. We are fast approaching the point of no return. The only way out of this calamitous descent is “shock and awe” on a global scale, and even that may not be enough.

Meanwhile, GOP.com is doing an Obama dump. All the Obama scandals you ever wanted to hear about and some you didn’t even know about.

• Obama and Ayers ^[4]
• Obama and the Slum Landlords ^[5]
• A Facebook-style friends list of Obama and just about every low-lifer imaginable ^[6]
• Obama and HUD ^[7]
• More Obama lowlife friends ^[8]

And Obama is ready to pay McCain back in his own coin. As I wrote, it’s now Fire at Will ^[9]. Maybe the mood is now one of anger and aggression ^[10] looking for a target, though the obvious target are entrenched politicians in their natural environment ^[11].