Bailout Brouhaha

Posted on September 29, 2008 by Kirk M

wall

Well, it happened, the $700 billion dollar bailout was voted down 228 to 205 in the house today. The vote against the measure was 228 to 205, with 133 Republicans turning against President Bush to join 95 Democrats in opposition. The bill was backed by 140 Democrats and 65 Republicans.

Of course the stock market, which was already falling as speculation of the bill’s rejection ran rampant, tumbled even farther once the news got out that the bill was actually rejected.

Wall Street was pinning its hopes on the government’s $700 billion financial system rescue plan. But the fervently wished-for bailout was rejected Monday by the House of Representatives in a stunning turn of events, and investors reacted with a vengeance. Major U.S. stock indexes plummeted Monday in one of their worst sessions ever.

The ugliness was widespread, with major indexes posting their worst percentage declines since the 1987 stock market crash. The Dow industrials fell 5.4%, the S&P 500 sank 7.8%, and the Nasdaq plunged a jaw-dropping 9.1%.

Another Black Monday for Wall Street: BusinessWeek

Closing market

So why did this wonder bailout bill fail to even pass a House vote? Well, the McCain campaign blames Obama outright of course (what else?), for not supplying good leadership when it was needed while the best I could find on the Democratic side was Obama continuing his ongoing rhetoric that McCain’s deregulation is far too risky for the economy (I tend to agree with this).

Of course the former stands to reason since it’s well known that Obama carries so much weight when it comes to his presence in Congress that it would actually sway the majority of the House vote to reject the bailout. If he hadn’t been there at all or hadn’t any say in the matter whatsoever, it’s obvious that the bailout would have passed hands down, no problem.

Yeah right, get real here.

That both McCain and Obama had both previously stated they were voting in favor of passing the bailout before the vote actually took place obviously meant that only McCain was telling the truth and Obama was just pulling our leg.

So what’s in this for the everyday working men and women out there? Those who basically live from paycheck to paycheck with no long term investments or large portfolios to sweat over? Well…looks like fuel prices might get cheaper:

Crude for November delivery dropped $10.52, or 9.8%, to close at $96.37 a barrel on Nymex. It was at its weakest closing level since Sept. 16.

In dollar terms, the futures marked their second-largest one-day drop on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The largest was set in January 1991 at a daily loss of $10.56, according to FactSet Research.

The failure of the bailout plan’s passage "will drop the oil price some more … because oil traders perceive this will hurt the economy — and as a result reduce oil demand," said Charles Perry, president of Perry Management, an energy-consulting firm.

The bottom for oil prices is probably around $90 now, but prices could go lower in the next month or two, he added.

Oil drops more than $10 as bailout plan fails to pass: MarketWatch

Uh…that’s good…

…isn’t it?

Grandad’s Back

Posted on September 21, 2008 by Kirk M

Grandad left us a few weeks ago to go on holiday. He went to France for 3 weeks. According to the news reports, France survived with minimal damage.

Holiday in France

Also apparently, he took the fine weather Ireland was having with him when he left (selfish ain’t he?) and all his friends had to tell him while he was gone was complaints about the lousy weather or so he says. Of course, when he arrives back from holiday a few days ago, he brought all the fine weather back with him. Now he thinks all his friends are a bunch of liars, malcontents and whiners.

And unfortunately, he seems to be having trouble shifting his mind back into gear. Maybe you all should go help him with it.

You know…I actually missed the old duffer.

McCain-I just have to say it.

Posted on September 20, 2008 by Kirk M

McCain…I don’t want him in the White House. I don’t want him leading my country. I know I didn’t much care for Obama when this campaign first started and I’m not saying whether or not I like him any better now but when it comes down to McCain vs Obama, Obama and his Democratic cohorts shine far and above.

Stephen C. Rose of The Huffington Post reflects my feelings quite well in a fairly short, to the point article I’ve excerpted below. Give it a read yourself and see what you think.

McCain is the man who crashed five jets, mistreated his wife, opposed Dr. King and would overturn Rowe v. Wade. He favors bombing anyone who does not fit in to the neocon agenda of forcing freedom everywhere while squelching it apace.

Stephen C. Rose: It’s McCain Stupid — Why McCain Is The Issue

I make it a point not to get too political on this blog nor am I that politically minded by nature but I’ve been drawn to the current election like a bee to pollen especially considering the current national and global situation. The next president is going to have one hell of a job on their hands and we need someone who is clear headed, open minded, intelligent and flexible. Someone who will refuse to resort to old, obsolete, narrow minded, “what’s in it for me?” way of doing things and McCain just doesn’t fit the bill.

There’s a whole lot of people, people that the general public will never know about until these good folks are most likely dead and gone, that put the safety of the people of not only this nation but the entire globe as a whole before everything else including health, welfare and even their own families to make sure this old world stayed just the way it was, problems and all. They succeeded and most of them paid dearly for it and I for one will not see it taken away by some befuddled old fool who appears more and more that he’s lost all sense of direction. Here’s another fine example (reading it won’t take long but the point is well made): McCain on banking and health

All this, of course, is purely subjective on my part and being too involved in old Cold War affairs I can hardly admit to offering an unbiased opinion however, just being experienced in those old Cold War affairs as I am, I know far too well what was nearly lost back then and it would be unbelievably sad and pathetic if we actually elected a President who, for all intensive purposes, would work hard at actually making things worse.

Alright…I’m done now.

I Have Won my First Contest!

Posted on September 15, 2008 by Kirk M

Yes, at long, long last I have finally won a contest. Not only that but it was a contest put on by the ever eloquent Liz Strauss that challenged her readers to take a picture and submit it to the contest along with a single sentence that, when combined together, would best express that Brand-New Blogging Feeling you got back when you first started out on this crazy fine adventure in blogging. The stakes were that the first fifty entries that followed the directions correctly, submitted a rather clever picture and the one-liner that described what your picture was saying would end up being the happy winners of a copy of Liz’s excellent eBook and a premium WordPress theme from Blog Design Studio.

Now anyone who knows me at all will tell you that I’m not the type of person that leaps at every possible chance to enter a contest, raffle, door prize and other such things, unless it’s for a really good cause and I never win these things…ever…until now that is.

The reason for actually wining this time is quite simple really. When I happened to get word of this particular contest, Inspiration just happened to be wandering by at the time and she slapped me on the back of my head as she strolled past (I’m sure most of you are familiar with this rather unique sensation). And because she took the time to administer this single act of kindness, my usually addled brain came up with this (in it’s final submitted form that is):

Now ask me if I was surprised when I received an email with Liz’s eBook attached to it. Good thing I caught this contest when I did because one minute later I would have missed it altogether—I was number 46 out of the possible 50. Pure kismet I tell ya’.

So 50 lucky and talented folks were the happy winners of one of Liz’s unique and always challenging contests. But wait, that’s not all. Liz whipped up a slide show of all the winning entries as a fine finishing touch along with yet another contest. You can find the slide show on her BRAND NEW BLOG Slide Show and the Now YUDU IT! Challenge post.

Now all I have to do is wait for a chance to win an all expense paid trip to SOBCon09 next May. Egad! No telling what I’d have to come up with for that one.

Thanks, Liz!

A Makeover for an Old Friend

Posted on September 12, 2008 by Kirk M

It’s getting close to 3 years now that this old personal type blog of mine has been around in one form or another. In fact, it may actually be a bit over 3 years by now considering that several initial posts were lost during the first move from the old Blogger platform to WordPress.com, long before it found it’s way to a self hosted situation. Seems like ancient history now and it’s hard to believe how much I’ve learned since then, especially in how deeply (informally) involved in WordPress I’ve become and how much I’ve enjoyed much helping others out in this respect. In many ways, blogging, the blogging community, the readers and, believe it or not, WordPress itself and the fine community involved in it’s development has kept me going through some fairly dark times health-wise.

A lot has happened since I first began this endeavor especially in how my health or lack thereof has changed my life over the past 3 years and, for better or worse, these changes have reflected in my writing; making it rather harsh sounding at times but one thing that always remained consistent (besides the inconsistency) is that I’ve always remained true to myself. You’ll never have to worry about whether or not I’m trying to be something other than myself.

Okay, enough of that already. So what about this makeover anyway?

Now I know I’ve changed themes from time to time while I attempted to make heads or tails of where I wanted the blog to go vs who I was vs whatever else and, of course, I wanted the looks of the thing to reflect that—whatever it was. It wasn’t until I finally wised up to the fact that it wasn’t where I wanted the blog to go rather than where the blog was leading me that I started to find my place in things. So for the past several months I used a very plain but very powerful theme for the site called Blog.txt and, as time went on, removed all the “baubles” and “bling” from the sidebar that created more of distraction than anything else. This included the text widgets that contained info from certain off site social networks that, unfortunately, would end up grinding my site to an almost complete stop when these particular networks became choked or went down altogether. It’s not that I’ve become less social in nature, it’s more of the keeping site loading times as short as possible so readers don’t become frustrated with the waiting. One of the top reasons that I (and a lot of readers in general) end up not revisiting a site is those unreasonably slow loading times and I wanted to avoid that at much as possible.

And I’m sure you all have noticed the new look of the blog, it’s fairly obvious now isn’t it? The new theme is called “Amazing Grace“, named after that grand old hymn by the same name and one of the very few that I’ve always loved myself (it’s the Gaelic/Celtic blood in me that does it and it should be played on the “pipes” as is proper). And no, it’s not the reason I chose the theme nor have I caught a bad case of religious fervor (God forbid). It’s simply because I like the overall look of the theme, the rotating images in the header and the nice wide content area. That plus it’s one of the only 3 column themes I’ve found where the 2 sidebars don’t distract from the content just by the fact of being there. It’s also one of the only 3 column themes that I actually like that still retains a personal feeling to the thing but that’s strictly subjective on my part so I’ll be curious to see if the folks that drop by feel the same way.

There are things to be done yet as there always are in the case of a site makeover like this. Such as inserting my own images into the header from photos I’ve taken over the years to take place of the default ones that came with the theme itself. I also have to come up with another Archives page since this theme doesn’t incorporate an archives template as some other themes do. For the latter it’s just a matter of finding an archives plugin that doesn’t make 100′s of queries to my poor database just to generate the thing. I’ve got the old site down to a whole 12 queries for the main page now so I don’t want a “heavy” archives page hanging around. And I’ll be spending some time weeding out those very old miscellaneous type posts that don’t really serve any purpose other than taking up space that can be used for something a bit more, shall we say, productive in nature? But that part of it isn’t all that critical so I can take my time with it.

I can’t honestly say that anything will change as far as the type of posts I’ll be writing, my tag line doesn’t say “Consistently Inconsistent” for nothing you know. I’ll be forever wandering from one path to another, exploring down different avenues of thought and, of course, getting ornery from time to time. It’s my nature to just be myself after all. But, as always, I welcome folks with a smile or at least a virtual one, and an invite to come on into the kitchen for a cup of coffee (or whatever) and talk awhile. So for what it’s worth, here I am (still) and here I stay. Hope you enjoy your visit.