It doesn’t matter what happened on Capitol Hill this week. What does matter is having a plan to get for getting past not just the next several days of ups and downs in the market but the coming year as well.

I thought we won the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell, pushed over by Ronald Reagan and his crusade for individual rights and free markets--free from as much government as he could dismantle during his political life.

Just as many of you were looking up at the sky rise towers of the big banks around the nation to make sure that you aren't going to be squashed like a bug by defenestrated bank executives, the government has stepped in with a fix for the whole credit market fiasco.

Embattled investment bank Lehman Brothers is now in liquidation mode. Regulators and what’s left of the street are hoping for a workout or, for some in the latter group, licking their chops like vultures over carrion.

With all the unfolding shenanigans--from stock analysts pimping companies they know aren’t worth the ink and paper used to report trades on your brokerage statements to hedge funds and prime brokers getting to play by different sets of rules--the market continues to get more and more dicey for the average stock investor.

Will the stock market ever recover? Where is the bottom for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 or the Nasdaq Composite--which hasn’t recovered since the last market blowup at the start of this decade--and when will we reach it?

Election years bring investors all sorts of anxieties. Aside from the various campaign promises designed to attract us to a particular candidate, we must also consider which nominee’s policy changes threaten to erode our financial well-being. Such considerations give new meaning to the term political plank, and pocketbook politics always hit home during times of economic and market malaise.

The US Dept of Labor reported this week that consumer prices spiked to a multiyear high. Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) hit 5.6 percent for the month of July. And the headline number, which includes food and fuel costs, is in fact the focus of many dramatic, eye-grabbing article titles in the print and electronic media.

The week ended up with a lot of folks all smiles-and-happy faces as they headed out to kick off one of the remaining summer weekends. Oil’s down, the dollar’s up, and the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrials are getting a respite from the downturn plaguing market optimists.

Why is it that we can’t seem to allow another country to be successful without demonizing it? Next week marks the beginning of the Summer Olympics in and about Beijing. Although many of us might not care about the competitive sports, we do seem to have an insatiable appetite for news and commentary that takes pot-shots at the Chinese.