Free The Undocumented Mark Steyn by Mark Steyn

one-hundred-trillion-dollar bank note. In that one dramatic month, the Zimbabwean dollar declined from 0.0000000072 of a U.S. dollar to 0.0000000003 of a U.S. dollar. But that’s what’s so great about being American. Because, when you’re American, one U.S. dollar will always be worth one U.S. dollar, no matter how many trillion-dollar coins you mint. Eat your heart out, you Zimbabwean losers. As Joe Weisenthal asks, what is money? Money is American: Everybody knows that.
    Whether the world feels this way is another matter. For Paul Krugman, the issue is the insanity of the Republican Party, as manifested in their opposition to automatic debt-ceiling increases. By contrast, the contrarian Democrat Mickey Kaus thinks Republicans ought to be in favor of the trillion-dollar coin as an easy short-term fix to prevent them from getting screwed over by Obama and the media for the second time in a month. But out there, in what the State Department maps quaintly call the rest of the world, nobody cares about Democrats or Republicans, and the issue is not the debt ceiling but the debt. Forty-four nations voted at Bretton Woods to make the dollar the world’s reserve currency. If they were meeting today, I doubt they’d give that status to a nation piling on over a trillion in federal debt per year, 70 percent of which its left hand (the U.S. Treasury) borrows from its right hand (the Federal Reserve) through the Nigerian-e-mail equivalent of Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar groat.
    Meanwhile, I see the Bundesbank has decided to move three hundred tons of German gold from the Federal Reserve in New York back to Frankfurt.It’s probably nothing. And what’s to stop the Fed replacing it with three hundred tons of Boston cream donuts and declaring them of equivalent value? Or maybe three hundred imaginary dead football girlfriends, all platinum blondes.
    Memo to John Boehner and Paul Ryan: No one will take you seriously until you find some photogenic second-graders and read out their cute letters. “I want everybody to be happy and safe and fithcally tholvent.” They may have to practice.

    1      Manti Te’o had recently been praised for continuing to play stellar football for Notre Dame while mourning his late girlfriend, Lennay, who had died in a car accident while battling Leukemia. Lennay turned out not to exist.

POTPOURRI ROASTING ON AN OPEN FIRE
    Maclean’s , December 25, 2006
    I ’ M ONE OF THOSE FELLOWS who tends to leave the old Yuletide preparations until around 2 p.m. on Christmas Eve only to discover that half the stores closed early at 1 p.m. and those still open have nothing left except for massive storewide clearances on Hannukah wrapping paper. Yet for a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-Santa-suit-pants kind of guy, I seem to have acquired over the years an enormous number of books on how to have the perfect Christmas. There’s Checklist for a Perfect Christmas by Judith Blahink and How to Have a Perfect Christmas by Helen Isolde and The Absolutely without a Doubt Most Fantastically Perfect Christmas Ever by Evelyn Minshull and Creating the Perfect Christmas: Stylish Ideas and Step-By-Step Projects for the Festive Season by Antonia Swingson and Sania Pell, because there’s nothing you need around this time of year more than a multi-step project. The more steps the merrier, I always say. One stands agape before those folks who not only have their own seasonal celebrations under scheduled-to-the-second control but also find time to write a bestseller with a faintly hectoring title like It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Less Like Christmas than It Should Considering It’s Already the Second Week of September .
    For the most part, these authors seem to have no existence beyond the holiday season. The two-female co-author combo is a particular favorite, both of them on the back in cozy sweaters looking like extras from The Andy Williams Christmas Show . Is there really an “Antonia Swingson” or “Sania Pell”? Their