REQUEST FOR URGENT CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

From: Minister of the Treasury Paulson

Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully,
Minister of Treasury Paulson



(hat-tip Wil Wheaton)

Brains, Green With Greed And Power

First, this joke: What's a liberal?
A conservative who's been ripped off by Wall Street

George Will asks, "Is this most leftist administration in history?"

( Government has seized the means of production. And a swipe at John McCain! )

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

( The last step in the Bush administration's war on the working class of the American people. )

Payback is a bitch for the party of Wall Street

( Are we finally getting clued? )

Did the Surge work as advertised?

( An economic analysis )

Rush Limbaugh says Barack Obama is "an Arab."

( And Rush is a genius! )

McCain: Even with the bailout, we can still balance the budget, and maintain four wars!

( A culture of ethical failure, continued. )

McCain lies about the press's coverage

( How shall we document the ways? )

The Twelve Lies Of Sister Sarah

( Andrew Sullivan documents the ways. )

AFA: Homosexuality causes Depression

( Eye-bleachingly stupid! )

I would totally date a woman who wore 'In the library' perfume.

( Mmm... Glasses. Knee-length conservative skirts. Full blouses. And now a perfume. )

The Digest digests Philip Roth's latest

( As nasty as ever. )

The 19 Ffmpeg Commands You'll Ever Need

( Hey, I'm a geek, okay? This is my braindump! )

I Am Now Officially Furious

For the past few days, we've been reading about the meltdown on Wall Street. We've heard vague details about how these huge companies have pumped up their on-paper value with "toxic" credit, much of which has been blamed (fairly and unfairly) on a mortgage mess where some matrix of irresponsibilty, gullibility, incompetence, desperation and greed met a similar matrix on the other side. In the middle, rating agencies illicitly or incompetently certified these "bundled" collections of mortgage paper as "guaranteed not to fail," and those guarantees were used to create more credit. The whole house of cards has now come crashing down, and you and I are left to pay the bill.

We are in the hands of an operation that must make the Mafia green with envy. Wall Street is now telling us, "That's a nice economy we had there, but it's turned sour. Give us $700 billion dollars or I'll have to hurt you much, much worse."

Bastards.

And now Congress is scrambling, shouting "We have to do something!," even while they admit they have no idea what will help, and Henry Paulson is telling us he needs that $700 billion dollars now. Or else.

This will raise our national debt, put a huge hole in the national budget, and condemn you, me, all of us, and all of our children, to repairing the damage caused by, well, by pretty much everything that's happened since the Contract On With America. It will destroy businesses, slow down the credit market, and trash our economy anyway. "Just not as bad without it." Oh, and we're being sold this bullshit in Augean volumes, as this morning Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota) said, "The government could make 10 or 20 times what it pays on this." Where have we heard that before?

So what do we learn today? In a short, almost unnoticed article in Roll Call, "The official newspaper of Capitol Hill," I read this:

[White House Deputy Press Secretary Antonio] Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough.

Re-read that. "Ought to be enough," every square inch of my festering colon.

All of this "emergency powers" stuff that Henry Paulson says he wrote up this weekend, that he needs now, that you don't have the time to review or the wisdow and training to comprehend, has been in the works for months.

Forgive me, I'm losing it. I winced last night when I dialed past Mark Levin trying to blame "regulation" for this problem (go read Roubini's analysis of what's happening to the unregulated "shadow banking" system this week and see if Levin is even on our world) and hit Randi Rhodes claiming that this was the neocons' last act of class warfare against the American working class, indenturing us to their rulership for generations to come.

But Fratto's little confession makes me realize that she's probably right: this is an opportunistic moment when those with the power see their vast reserves of cash as the best way to ride out the coming disaster, at the end of which you and I will still be responsible for paying off the debt with which our political leaders saddled all of us, just so their oligarchal masters can keep their personal Lear jets.

Dear WorldNetDaily: Yes, I knew that.

Okay, time to calm down and think about having gay sex with angels.

See, WND is touting a book called Shocked by the Bible in which the writer seeks to tell you "shocking" things you never knew about the Bible, like (and I quote, with parentheticals):

• There were not just two of every kind of animal aboard Noah's Ark (Genesis 7)
• Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were not Jews (the designation "Jew" is "son of Judah." Noah, Abraham and Isaac were all before Judah's time. Genesis 35)
• The Bible talks about "gay" sex with angels. Yes, you read that right. (Genesis 9:15)

It blows my mind that WND thinks they can sell this crap. How can Bible-believing Christians not know this stuff? I know this stuff, and I'm your run-of-the-mill lazy Buddhism-without-belief kinda Zen, kinda horny pagan unbeliever. It's all there in your silly book.

Apparently, more pagans have read the Bible than Christians.

C __LINE__ equivalent in Python

I started using this recently. If you do a lot of Python, you’ll sometimes find yourself desperate for breadcrumbs, little print statements scattered throughout your code as you try to figure what you told it to do, since it’s obviously not doing what you want it to do. I’d used inspect previously to unravel exception handlers; there’s a customized one inside the Isilon UI, so if the product fails in the field the exception will be logged to a file for later analysis, but this is a nice little routine. It’s basically a pythonic version of the C __LINE__ macro. Wherever you think you might need a debugging statement, put if DEBUG: print _line(), foo, bar, baz and you’ll not only get the fields you want to see, but also the name of the function/method, and the line number of the print statement.

import inspect
def _line():
    info = inspect.getframeinfo(inspect.currentframe().f_back)[0:3]
    return '[%s:%d]' % (info[2], info[1])

Use as needed.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

My schedule is solid

My life right now is so hectic and surreal I'm tempted to take a week off. I need the time to get back in touch with my inner dickgirl.