But remember kids, it was deregulation that made our economy as strong as it is today

The ink had barely dried on Henry Paulson's three page proposal before it was treated like a fait accompli by the mass media. Headlines such as "Today, we are all socialists" and "How We Became the United States of France," have found their ways to the pages.

What the fuck.

A poor custodian of a failed, lame duck administration's Treasury Department wrote three pages of text and our shithead of a President has said that it needs to be made law post haste, normal legislative process be damned. Stop me if you've heard this one.

Initial reactions give a glimmer of hope to the possibility that just maybe our two presidential candidates will work together to kill this one. Maybe.

Princeton Economics professor and occasional New York Times contributer Paul Krugman, described the proposal as Henry Paulson declaring "all your decisions are belong to me."

I almost didn't notice that a perfectly respectable economist had just made an All Your Base reference on national television, what with the trying to wrap my head around a Republican administration advocating a nationalization of the financial sector. The same Republican administration that wanted to put said financial sector in charge of Social Security.

700 billion dollars in the hands of one man, whose decisions are unimpeachable by any court or legislative body.

What a bunch of fucking Professors. The economy tanks due to deregulation in the banking industry, so let's hand the keys to someone who'll himself be subject to no sanction or regulation.
And lets borrow a trillion fucking dollars from China to do it.


Of course, there is one presidential candidate who is surrounded by the people responsible for this unholy mess. He'd have you believe that it was Obama, though.

The McCain Campaign's declaration that the New York Times and Politico.com have ceased to be journalistic institutions, one for investigating Rick Davis, the other for pointing out provable falsehoods in the campaign's unprincipled slander of the Times, should come as no surprise. When your political ambitions require that the People fail to recognize you for who you truly are, anyone caught peddling Truth becomes the Enemy.

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The last season of Boston Legal began tonight. I believe that the show has existed about as long as this blog has, actually. In any case, it managed to take a fairly well-traveled issue in the case against Big Tobacco and breathe fresh life into it, which I appreciate. The idea, as posited on the show, that the anti-smoking commercials funded by the tobacco companies are actually intended as reverse psychology to entice young people to pick up the habit, was one of those things that provoked in me both shock and puzzlement as to why I hadn't guessed at it previously. I've had a lot of those lately.

............

Today happens to be the first anniversary of this event, wherein I met (0r met people who would introduce me to) most of the people I spend time with on any kind of a regular basis, all the result of a webcomic. One year later, five of the people I met that day and one who I came to know through my involvement with the xkcd forums have moved into a house in Somerville. Two came from Virginia, one from New Jersey, one from Michigan, one from New Mexico. They moved in with yet another friend I met that day who happens to be from here.

The extent to which this series of events is fucking awesome is hard to properly quantify. Suffice to say, I rarely find myself without something to do on the weekends anymore.