My Brain, Slowing Down

First an apology and a retraction: as ideaphile pointed out, I wrote incorrectly about Rick Davis' relationship with Freddie Mac. He was not receiving $15,000 a month; the firm he owns received the money. Both Davis and the firm have stated that Davis is not drawing money on the equity and income of his firm, so technically no money has been flowing from Freddie Mac to Rick Davis' pocket while Davis has been managing McCain's campaign.

Ideaphile accused me of lying for political gain, but the answer is simpler: I was sloppy and went for the most salacious reading possible. In the twenty minutes I have between my home and the first transit center, when the bus is too packed to write porn, I scan through my RSS feed at high speed, going through almost two hundred articles a day to tag maybe twenty-five for a re-read. From those I then re-tag the URLs, which get sent to a python script to create the skeleton for my braindumps. As in the case of the NYTimes articles about Davis-- and as I frequently do-- I scanned it to assess its credibility, but I relied on other bloggers to give me the precis and meta of the material. Ideaphile wants to attribute my summary to mendacity, but it was ordinary sloppiness and stupidity. I'm sorry if you feel misled.

With that in mind, I shall be more careful with today's readings. Onward, then.

Where did the $700 billion figure come from?

A U.S. Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday: "It's not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Are you ready to hand over your hard-earned cash to people who pulled a number out of their collective ass? And was Tony Fratto lying when he claimed the plan had been in the works for weeks and months?

Meanwhile, in another universe...

This Administration deserves to be trusted because it has kept us safe from terrorist attack since 9/11, has fought and won two wars, has presided over eight years of economic growth, has appointed two stellar justices to the Supreme Court, and has even learned how to do Louisiana's job of protecting that state from hurricanes. The day will come, and not before long, when Americans will wish that George Bush was still president.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Bush Scares Nation, Bailout Gains Momentum.

( Best headline of the day! )

Steve Benen on the McCain M.O.

( Man on a white horse moments. )

McCain loses the Wall Street Journal's OP ED page!?

( Holy Shiznit! )

Spotted on Craigslist's M4M Casual Encounters:

( “Dignified older man seeks second-tier foreign leaders, ambassadors and has-been foreign policy wonks to meet with his young, comely apprentice and soulmate.” )

Meanwhile, another $25 billion dollar bailout is underway.

( Look, a monkey! )

A dark laugh: Don't Lie to David Letterman.

( He Has Many Cans of Whoop Ass He Can Open )

How bad was the Couric interview of Sarah Palin?

( Watch it for yourself. )

Also, I don't have a link, but after Bush's speech last night, I heard NPR's finance reporter say, "I was down on the [stock market] floor today. These people are so desperate for this money."

My money. Your money.

Count me as one of those people convinced that "doing nothing" might, in fact, be the best of all possible actions. James Pethokoukis at US News and World Report (you know, the more serious version of Time and Newsweek) quotes an analyst who documents the currently known risks, compares it equivalently to the last two recessions, and writes today

I'm sorry. Spending $700 billion (which is really $2.5 trillion [after interest - Elf] since you are borrowing the money) to stop a recession-- no worse that what we saw in 1990-91 (one quarter of -3 percent growth and one quarter of -2 percent growth) or even 2001 (one quarter of -1.4 percent growth)-- seems nutsy. If they want to get this thing passed, Paulson and Bernanke better be more explicit about the risks.

Obama rolls, the bastard

Obama today:

Congressional leaders have made progress in their negotiations, and appear close to a deal that would include these principles. President Bush addressed some of these issues last night, and I'm pleased that Senator McCain has decided to embrace them too. Now is a time to come together -- Democrats and Republicans -- in a spirit of cooperation on behalf of the American people.

Goddamit. Calls to Congress are rolling in 300 to 1 opposed to raising the debt and handing $700 billion taxpayer dollars to Wall Street. I understand that we hire these people to be smarter and more introspective about these issues than you or I have the time to be, but at 300 to 1 you'd think they'd listen.

This is like FISA all over again. Do we really have to vote for either?

(Yeah, we kinda do.)

WANT

Oh, yeah.

The Javascript Framework Phrasebook

I work with EXT and Prototype at the office, and Dojo at home. I have a lot more time with EXT than either of the other two, so when I’m working on a personal project my first thought is “If this were EXT, I’d do it this way, but how do I do it in Dojo?”

It’s useful to write that knowledge down.

Last night, I ginned up a quick wiki, dropped in a theme I liked, and put the whole thing up. It only has a few entries right now but they should be enough to show what I’m trying to accomplish. If you find this a useful idea, please contribute to it and publicize it:

The Javascript Framework Phrasebook

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