This felt Greaaaat!

We voted early so that we could help Obama GOTV in Bucks County, PA this weekend!


I highly recommend that you do the same because here's what will happen:
You'll stand taller, your skin will clear up and it will help the pain go away!

Paulson: "Put Pigs in charge of Lipstick"

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was making the rounds on the Sunday news shows trying his gosh darn best to sell us on this bailout, but one fact remains: he's gonna need a lot more lipstick.

$700B Dollars.
According to CNN, that's $200B more than the cost of the Iraq War, $100B more than Social Security payments last year, 9 times the cost of education last year, 35 times the cost of all foreign aid in most years and would buy enough oil to last US consumers 300 days or 2000 McDonalds apple pies for each man, woman and child in the US.

That's a lot of apple pies. So where are the assurances from Paulson that this plan will work? There could be more bank failures, jobs lost, a worsening of the economy even if this plan is implemented.
And what happens if it's not? The only report I've seen in the MSM so far is from CNN.
CNN Business correspondent Christine Romans, who has covered the market for 15 years, reports with certainty, "What we do know is what the economy can look like without a bailout."

The amber (amber...nice touch) graphic on screen reads:

ECONOMY WITHOUT A BAILOUT
What could happen:
-Companies can't make payroll or pay bills
-Consumers and small businesses can't get loans
-Corporate profits fall, hurting govt. revenue
-Companies are not going to hire people, they're going to lay people off.
-Housing prices fall ("and fall hard, and fall fast!" she adds)
-Property taxes decline
-Funding drops for schools and local services.

Well at least there's no mention of mushroom clouds yet.

She continues:

"It's really a big confidence game too, I mean you gotta have confidence in these financial institutions otherwise they're not lending money to each other and if they're not lending money to each other then the rest of us aren't getting loans and people are pulling in our, our home equity lines of credit and, and, and we're not getting car loans, we're not getting student loans, and all of that just chokes the economy. And if the economy is choked and we don't grow then everybody hurts."

And what about implementing the plan?

"...There are always unintended consequences but what we're also hearing is that, um, that is a risk that has to be taken, this has got to be done fast because the certainty, uh, is, is much much worse so this is just, this is all weigh..[she sighs] you know it's who do you trust, it's who do you trust, the banks have already gotten, you know the banks have already gotten us into a whole heap of trouble, um, you know, and I'm going to say one last thing a couple of people have said to me, listen this is all about people, at its core, this is about people who took, took out home loans and they couldn't afford it. This is about people getting more than they could afford and, and, and I've heard an awful lot, there's an awful lot about this going on, on talk radio too."

Ah, so a "couple of people" have told her that at its core, this economic meltdown is not about greedy CEOs or Lobbyist or a failed Conservative economic philosophy - it's all the fault of, you know...those other people.

But then she mentions that more than one Mayor, County Attorney and Wall Street Guru has told her that poor people didn't get us into this trouble, the banking sector got us into this trouble and now tax payers are going to pay for it.

Well that clears it up for me.

The sick and demented, fiscally conservative imposters of the modern Republican party. By all means, let's put them in charge.

Meet the World

From the "Meet the World" Website:

MEET THE WORLD
Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro gave us a small statement about the campaign, translated by Isabell Erdmann:

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.
This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

That’s it, basically.

Finally, a remedy for Sarcasm

Bush and Cheney Split the Flag

When examining political logos from past elections, the Bush/Cheney flag stands out from the others.
Isn't this an interesting interpretation of what they've done to the country? Or perhaps they always intended to represent just the "upper tier" of Americans.

The Financial Markets Explained