Hello, my name is Tootsie Pop

Sorry for not posting. I was suffering pre-election traumatic syndrome. It was just too awful thinking of the election to post.

My voting record still holds: Milady and I have voted differently in every election I have been eligible to vote in. She voted for Obama, while I voted for Bob Barr. Ben Chandler won (1-2 for me), and so did Mitch McConnell (oops, 1 for 3). Most of the rest in my precinct were unopposed, so there weren't many choices. I did write Milady in for State Senator, but Kentucky doesn't count write-in votes unless you pre-register, so no one will know it but you.

Now, here's my new self portrait:

Why is that? Simple. I am a SUCKER! Milady and Little Miss walked up after I went to Wal-Mart and showed me this:

We now have an 8 week old Boston Terrier pup named "Queen Padme Amadala Packrat". Given my ever-growing dislike of the prequel trilogy, I tried lobbying for a change in name, but again, I'm a sucker. Padme it is.

Around 5AM this morning, I felt a little tongue licking my back. Milady had gotten suckered into getting her out of her cage and putting her in bed. At least she seems to be pad-training well, so she didn't wet the bed.

It's a good thing I don't think I'm in control of my family.... ;)

Why is "When He Cheats" so good?

OK, she looks good in leathers and a baseball bat. If a guy destroys the girl's car, he would be a childish creep needing therapy. When the girl destroys a guy's truck, she's strong and catty. Sorry, I just don't buy it. I hear the song and think "Boy is she a baby".

I am so glad that that song is mostly gone....

Vote the lot out -- except 1

Sorry for the light postings. My employer sent us to test our Disaster Recovery plan, and I'm still not fully caught up from the time off.

I have decided how I'm going to vote in all of the races open to me: the incumbent must go. All except one: Ben Chandler's race for the House. In general, I am not a Chandler fan. He is a "light socialist", and he votes with Pelosi and crew way too much for my tastes. Nonetheless, he voted against the bailout both times, and I have to reward that. I have no confidence his opponent is a small-government Republican, mainly because I haven't heard one word out of his opponent....

I am going to cover my reasoning for the other major candidates, including Obama/McCain, in future posts.

Joe the Plumber for President

To quote Bill Bennett, this is the most people have talked about plumbers since Nixon....

I thought Bob should leave and bring Joe onto the stage. He was the real third man on the stage.

I'm not impressed with the Socialists (aka the Republicans)

Work has had my nose to the grindstone (more as I can talk about it), so I've been ignoring the financial news as much as possible. Even so, the concept that the Fed is buying preferred stock in banks, even if they don't want it, is too much. Are these people really reading straight from the Communist Manifesto.

Furrfu, people! The Great Depression isn't a how-to guide! Let's see, prop up banks: check. Talk about protectionism, check.

What scares me is that it's the Republicans doing all this socialism, not the Democrats.

The whole world is turned upside down. It's a good thing I trust the Lord, because I sure don't trust my leaders.

I'm impressed with the Brick

I love the new MacBook and MacBook Pro. Apple has a video about how they mill the case for the MacBook (and by extension, the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air). You have to recycle about a half to two-thirds of the aluminum you have in the original block of aluminum, but you have a case that can then be built by any metal working factory in the world (even the US!), and is a lot greener than a slab of plastic.

I'd want one, but work lets me use a year-old MacBook Pro, and that's as much as I need. The family and I might squeeze enough out to buy a MacBook for Christmas next year for homeschool.

Let me get this straight

While the rest of us are watching  our 401ks, the legislators in Alaska have enough time on their hands to put out a report that's all things to all people. When you can't even get a single talking head on Anderson Cooper to think it's a serious issue, it's time to go back to the well.

As best I can tell, Palin's brother-in-law is a dangerous, somewhat unstable fellow. Mr. Palin likes her family, and saw an opportunity to try to help them out. The Public Service Commissioner was from another branch of the Republican party, didn't like Mrs. Palin, and saw an opportunity to tweak her "for free". That put him on her bad list. Then, \ she and the Public Service Commissioner butted heads again over hiring troopers. Maybe he thought too much of himself, maybe he just couldn't hire more troopers no matter what. Either way, he's on the list so it's time to go.

Sounds like office politics, not "high crimes and misdemeanors". To quote Carville, this dog doesn't hunt.

The office is quiet

For the first time in a decade, I am serverless at home.

A couple of weeks ago, we went over the budget, to see what we could cut. We're going to start looking at fluorescent PAR-30 lights for the downstairs, and we thought about turning off the phone and DSL to switch to cable. The one problem with this was that I had all my mail, this blog, etc. going to a server plugged in under my desk. A server that desperately needed both software and hardware upgrades (it is 4+ years old and was running a beta version of NetBSD). As best I could tell, I was spending almost $20 a month just powering the big rack-mount server.

That's when The Plan™ came together. I would move all of the home services to Google Apps. This blog moved to Blogger, mail went over to Gmail, and the web sites moved to Google Sites. Why should I spend valuable home time maintaining web pages when Google is happy to do so for free, or for $50 a year per mailbox if I end up needing more space.

We ended up keeping the phone line because the Cable Modem + Dish* isn't that much cheaper than Phone + DSL + ISP + Dish. Turning off the unneeded PCs will pay for that difference.

Now, I just have to get off Yahoo Domains. They've raised my domain costs to $35/year. Anyone know a decent cheap domain registrar (and no, I won't use GoDaddy. They're notorious for kidnapping domains for the flimsiest of excuses).

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*For the channels we like, Dish's 250 channel plan (with Windstream discounts) is much cheaper than Insight's equivalent services.

They've passed the abomination

Of course Dub will sign it too.

I would spout some more, but I'm just too mad. I'll start cussing.

More insanity for the bailout

From CNNMoney's report on the Senate version of the bailout:

The bill adds provisions to the House version - including temporarily raising the FDIC insurance cap to $250,000 from $100,000. It says the FDIC may not charge member banks more to cover the increase.... Instead, the bill allows the FDIC to borrow from the Treasury to cover any losses that might occur as a result of the higher insurance limit.

The Fed's already going to print 700B to cover the bailout, why not print a few billion more....

I think Congress has lost their minds.

Another scraping from the back recesses of my brain

Again, a comment from Megan McArdle's, What am I so afraid of?, I post:

One thing that just hit me at lunchtime: Where is the government going to get this magical $700 billion? The Treasury doesn't have it laying around in a sack under Mr. Paulson's office. The government only has 2 ways to get that $700b:

• Sell Treasury paper on the open market (or more likely straight to sovereign funds and central banks). M2 right now is around 7.7 trillion dollars (US style). 700B is around 9% of that. If you believe Shadow Stats, M3 is around 14 trillion. $700b is 5% of that. How are the money markets supposed to react to 5% of the total supply of dollars suddenly being pulled into Treasuries?
  
• Have the Fed "buy" the Treasury paper with new money. How exactly is inflation supposed to react if we magically increase M2 by 9%? Fed-printed money is supposedly M3 (i.e. doesn't really count), so the whole justification in inflating the crap out of M3 was that it didn't leak into M2. Making M2 jump 10% in a matter of days just can't be healthy. Sounds a lot like Weimar Germany to this Packrat.

Neither option makes a lot of sense to me, and the latter sounds downright painful. I'm almost suspecting that a natural deflationary recession would be better for us all.

The money system is a zero-sum game. If you spend $50, you had to get it from somewhere. If you try to get it from nowhere (fiat money creation), you end up taking it from everyone.

The American People aren't THAT dumb

Tell me ONE way that the Paulson bailout plan (or the House version of it) will fix the systemic damage in the financial market, and I'll support it. Yes, it will inject up to $700 billion into the financial industry. That's nice. (Of course, no one mentions the $700b+ it'll take out of the financial industry in treasury paper....) That would help a bit, but it won't fix anything!

If I'm supposed to part with my part of $700b, what will it do to keep this from happening again?

No Love of the Presidential Candidates in Congress

Milady and I were talking last night, and I said, "No one is talking about how much Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid hate Obama." "I was just sitting here thinking the same thing."

This was the moment for Obama to shine. President Bush threw out a plan that was little more than "Give Paulson $700b and stand back". Everyone in the country hated the plan because it threw money at the problem, not solutions. This was a moment that was ripe for a leader. All the Democrats had to do was compose a Democratic version of the bill that appealed to their base and the moderates, and stick Obama out in front of it. There are really smart Democratic economists; Robert Reich could come up with a better bailout than this. (N.B. After looking a bit, Robert Reich appears to have a blog, and he DID come up with a bailout plan that makes a lot of sense, even if he does like the more noxious idea of bankrupcy judges rewriting mortgages.) Then stick Obama in front of a teleprompter camera and have him tell the country why its such a good plan and how he is leading the Democrats in the House to pass the bill. They could then make it the Senate Republican's fault, and by extension John McCain's fault.

But no, Mr. Obama is AWOL. Neither Pelosi nor Reed will even mention his name, or get him involved in the action. I don't know if this is payback for defeating Clinton, or a strong measure of personal dislike, but they don't want him on that podium.

I don't have to post much about the Republican's inherent dislike of McCain. To quote the SNL skit (hat tip: Vox Day):

I have never supported President Bush. I have undermined President Bush, just ask any Republican! I have always been disloyal to this president, a disloyal, untrustworthy, unreliable renegade who has abandoned my party when it most needed me. The fact is, you simply can't count on John McCain. That's why on November 4th, the American people will elect me their next president.

The best satire is 99.9% true. The House Republicans KNOW that McCain would sell them down the river in a moment, and are completely unwilling to put one ounce of trust in him.

If either major party had a candidate with one ounce of leadership, he would have taken over that debate and stepped in on this bill and taken over. Instead we have an old warrior politician who's burned too many bridges and a younger man who's never taken the time to make any.

A comment on Carpe Diem

Over at Carpe Diem, in "New Banking Data", Anonymous asked:

How can interbank lending be frozen while other types of lending are ok?

Here's my opinion:

It's a sign of the CDS meltdown. The banks trust their customers to repay their debts more than they trust each other to stay solvent.

I think this credit crisis will spread some, especially if more banks closed. However, we don't need to patch over that debt; we need to burn it.

UPDATE: A Fox News talking head said "we're too much in debt. Let's give them more." Yeah, right....

An important comment

Megan McArdle has all but abandoned libertarianism to support the bailout. On the post So what happens now?, I noted:

On one side we have Japan: a 10+ year depression caused by the government bailing out every Tom, Dick, and Harry that got burned by lending money before a real estate market collapse.

On the other side, Nancy Pelosi and George Bush are telling us that there will be Hell On Earth (tm) if we don't bail out every Tom, Dick, and Harry who got burned by lending money before a real estate market collapse. Excuse me if I think we're going down the wrong road.

You don't cure a hangover by handing out vodka, and you don't cure too much bad loans by handing out more loans. You close the loans, and start over. The credit markets don't need quantity, they need quality.

It burns, it burns....

When I see a picture like this:





I have to resist the urge to grab my wallet and a gun. When Barney Franks is this happy, the rest of us should be very, very afraid.

Who won the debate?

So, who won the McCain-Obama debate? I think it's a draw. Mr. McCain certainly was on the attack, but he wasn't mean. He did rattle Mr. Obama, which surprised me some. OTOH, Mr. Obama certainly was able to give up his teleprompter and actualy speak. If there was one sound bite that conservative talk shows will run with, it's all of the "I agree with Senator McCain" type statements.

I could tell their ages and generations. McCain was all "Senator Obama" this and "Senator Obama" that, while it was "John" this and "John" that. My mother, Miss Manners that she is, would have had my hide for talking to an older man that way. I know it's more casual in life now, but I just can't help thinking that things didn't improve.

So, did you actually change your mind because of this debate? I didn't. I'm still voting for Bob Barr. Even if those square glasses of his look like old women's glasses....

Migration

I'm restoring my old posts. I might make some new ones too. Eventually.

Update: I have all of my "new" posts up, and I was able to dig out the archive from my original blog. Right now, I'm going through them as fast as Blogger's spam filters let me work.

One of the "holy grails" of film have been found

I am so in awe that I can barely type. I've always loved Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Its influence on science fiction, cinema, and our culture, just can't be overestimated. It just hasn't been seen intact since 1927. The first showings of Metropolis were a critical and financial disaster, so Paramount cut almost a quarter of the movie (including most of the plot). The removed original footage was assumed lost. Experts debated what was even on the footage until details about the German language cards were found in the mid-90s.

Yesterday, ZEITmagazin announced that that was wrong. A copy of almost the entire movie was found in Argentina. It's a second or third-generation copy, and damaged, but it can be viewed, and we can see the story. Even better, the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation is dedicated to bring ing the new footage out to the public!

Time to break out my Kino copy of the last restoration, to tide me over until 2010 or whenever they get this version restored.

I hate home improvement activities

The house has been fixed up (with the exception of the kitchen phone line... oops) for around a year now. That's left the garage. The person door was rotting, the original Masonite car door was giving up the ghost, and the eaves had enough water damage to need some repair. A month or so ago, we went to Home Depot and buy a new garage door and new person door. I installed the person door myself, but the garage door was too much; they were going to have to do that themselves.

Last Thursday, Milady gets a phone call that the door is in, and will be ready to install Tuesday. OK, no problem. We spent all Saturday rearranging the garage, and pulling my old rustbucket (i.e. the Ford 1950 F-1) out onto the patio.

Tuesday rolls around, and Milady gets a call: not only is the garage door not there, it was never there. It seems that the garage door was backordered because the garage door opener was backordered. The lady who called said she'd get estimate on when the garage door open er would be available, and call us back.

Today, I had to call in and leave a message for their expeditor to see why we didn't have the promised door. I also mentioned my concerns about the lack of professionalism and a lack of confidence that they could deliver contractual obligations. Unfortunately, the expeditor didn't mention anything about those concerns when she called me back, and just said that they'd try to have the doors in by next Thursday.

This is where I need prayer for patience. :( I put a call into their manager, but of course they're in a meeting. (They're ALWAYS in a meeting.) If the manager can't assure me that they'll actually deliver the door in a reasonable amount of time, and possibly offer a discount for the month's delay, then I'm stuck going to another vendor.

Now I just need to plan fixing the eaves. Looks like I'm taking a week off in late October for that....