Below is a brief letter from a Philly-area paper recently.
Hottie Joe
Am I the only one to have given serious thought to the manly appeal of Joe Biden? Are we immune to his warm, sweet smile? Are we not stirred by his broad shoulders? Are we incapable of fantasizing? He’s not merely sexy – he’s hot!Ruth Rosen
Philadelphia
If you find yourself with about 10 minutes to kill, I strongly recommend this debate between two candidates for a seat in the Alaska State House.
I followed up B-Dawg by taking the Art Personality quiz. My result seemed relatively accurate.
Ever wonder where Internet rumors come from? The NY Times has an article that traces the history of the “Obama-As-A-Secret-Muslim” story.
The NYTimes does a decent write-up on Obama’s relationship (or lack thereof) with Bill Ayers. This coincides with McCain & Palin picking up on this topic again as a part of “going negative” on Obama. Meanwhile, another group proposes their idea for how Obama should hit back at McCain over his relationship with G. Gordon Liddy.
CNN has a fun article up about how some people believe the concept of “mark to market”, which states that companies have to report the value of their assets as though they would be sold today (i.e. the market value), is behind the financial crisis. Specifically, that because companies have to mark down the value of the mortgage-backed securities they own since the market value has collapsed, they can no longer afford to lend because they cannot maintain adequate capital ratios.
“The SEC has destroyed about $500 billion of capital by their continued insistence that mortgage-backed securities be valued at market value when there is no market,” said William Isaac, a former chairman of the FDIC.
I love the inherent contradiction in the line above. That mortgage backed securities should not be valued at their market value since there is no market, which is largely because they are considered worthless.
The NY Times has now made TimesPeople an irritating overlay of their website, further restricting my view of what I actually go the NY Times website to do – read articles. Seriously, the website is becoming more and more like TV, where windows and scrollbars float and spin all around, reducing the actual viewable screen real-estate down to nothing.
Think about it – One skinny column of text, with another equally sized column of miscellaenous crap I may or may not be interested along the side, a whole slew of additional “stuff” at the bottom, and now another bar across the top that floats there all the time? What happened to getting the content I actually WANT?