Well, I guess after were picked clean. (By the way take a look at the maniacal guy in the upper right)
We can have Uncle Obama tell us a bed time story (By the way take a look at the maniacal guy in the center)
I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have my own personal hole.
In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?
Jeremy and I went with some friends on Saturday to the NHRA Qualifying Rounds at the Auto Club Raceway (formally known to all die hard drag aficionado’s endearingly as Pomona Raceway). We had lot’s of fun. We showed up around 9:00am and caught the Sportsman classes (140mph), Pro-Stock (220mph and a lovely smell of Nitro-Methane), Top-Fuel Funny Car and 
Dragsters (300mph in 1000ft including Bleeding Ears and Body Shakes), finished off by the Alcohol cars (back down to the 240mph). We also had a majestic view of the “Complex Fire” that started at 9:00am in Corona just south of the racetrack. 
Having not gone to the drag’s before we took lots of water in our camelbacks but no food. Next time we go we decided that we would bring an ice chest and our own lunch instead of paying 4.50 for a hot dog. Of course, a seating pad would be a nice addition since the seating is all metal grandstand and you will be on you ass for a good 6-7 hours to see each of the car types run. We may make plans to go there for the Winter Nationals in Feb ‘09.
Saving any of the Big Three would just encourage the Management and the Unions into taxpayer subsidized euphoria. I think the free market is telling them that their products are no longer in line with the market. I’m by no means a “Global Warming Holocaust Greenie” (I think most of those people are brain stems with eyes), but efficient alternative fuel transportation just makes sense scientifically, economically, and national security effective. Also, there are some good things about unions as they keep Management from exploiting the worker, but the one thing I hate about unions is when they have the audacity to promote more pay for less productivity and lower quality goods and services. Union members base salary should be based on the individuals added value to the product and the benefits can be negotiated based on company competitiveness in the free market. If the company can’t afford to pay for your health care because they aren’t making a profit, then help figure a way to make the company profitable or get the hell out and work somewhere else.
Morgan Housel at The Motley Fool
General Motors (NYSE: GM) fell 23% yesterday. Shares hit levels not seen since 1946 — a mere 38 years after Ford’s (NYSE: F) Model T was introduced. Ford itself is less than a buck away from penny-stock territory. Chrysler’s minority shareholder, Daimler, has written its stake down to … drumroll, please … zero.
“As GM goes, so goes the nation,” the old saying went. Let’s hope they weren’t being serious.
Detroit’s auto giants are running out of gas. Without a bailout, they’re likely in big trouble. Before the gauge hits empty, auto execs, politicians, and investors are lining up to beg for help. And why not? Even strong banks like JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) and Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) have received 11-figure injections from the Treasury. Why not include beleaguered auto giants, too? Too big to fail! Right?
Uh, no
Comparing a Detroit bailout to a financial-system bailout is, quite frankly, stupid. When auto manufacturers go out of business, we lose jobs. When the financial system goes out of business, we lose the economy. If GM fails, Chevy trucks won’t simultaneously explode. If AIG (NYSE: AIG) fails, financial markets will simultaneously explode.
Read More: Morgan Housel at The Motley Fool
It’s been a month and I have had this one stashed since the first of October when the stock markets went into a meltdown. I now present Doctor Evil.
Neel Kashkari was designated as the Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability on October 6, 2008. In this capacity, Mr. Kashkari oversees the Office of Financial Stability including the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Mr. Kashkari also continues to hold the position of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economics and Development, but his International Affairs responsibilities are delegated to Assistant Secretary for International Affairs Clay Lowery while Mr. Kashkari serves as Interim Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability.
Mr. Kashkari joined the Treasury Department in July 2006 as Senior Advisor to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. In that role, he was responsible for developing the President’s Twenty in Ten energy security plan, enhancing Treasury’s engagement with India, particularly in the area of infrastructure development, and developing and executing the Department’s response to the housing crisis, including the formation of the HOPE NOW Alliance, the development of the subprime fast-track loan modification plan, and Treasury’s initiative to kick-start a covered bond market in the United States.
Prior to joining the Treasury Department, Mr. Kashkari was a Vice President at Goldman, Sachs & Co. in San Francisco, where he led Goldman’s IT Security Investment Banking practice, advising public and private companies on mergers and acquisitions and financial transactions. Prior to his career in finance, Mr. Kashkari was a R&D Principal Investigator at TRW in Redondo Beach, California where he developed technology for NASA space science missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
We’ll get to that in a second. Here is who he is not: Neel Kashkari is not a wunderkind. He’s not an evil genius. He’s not a mastermind.
Kashkari, the 35-year-old interim head of the Office of Financial Stability, has been the source of great worry. Many fear he’s too young and too inexperienced to handle the task of rebuilding the nation’s financial system.
Of course, Kashkari may just have the job for a few months. Paulson made clear he will appoint somebody and try to get the new person confirmed in November, and that person would transition into the next administration.
Forty-five days isn’t a long period in normal times, but in this crisis it’s an age. To get a better understanding of him, Deal Journal spoke to people who knew Kashkari well in his childhood and during his time at Goldman Sachs to find out the character and working style of the man who is managing the nation’s bailout.
Here’s the portrait that emerged: Kashkari is smart, dutiful, detail-oriented, and takes orders well. In the parlance of investment banking, he is a good “execution guy”: He leaves strategy to the bigwigs. But if you give him a project, he will prioritize, delegate and finish it.
These people report he has an amiable manner and is a good, intent listener. He doesn’t make waves and never dominates a discussion; he thinks before he speaks and he lets people express themselves. He is particularly good at presenting complicated ideas and leading team projects that depend on gaining cooperation from others. Those include the Sunrayce project to build a solar car as well as his work on the space telescope. “Neel is just plain good, with a high standard of ethics,” said Dr. Surinder Bhardwaj, a Hindu community priest who is a close family friend to the Kashkaris in Ohio. “This is a responsibility that requires the interest of the nation as a whole, and requires a very strong base of morality, which he has.”
Kashkari comes from a small, tight-knit community of Indian Hindus in Ohio, where his parents had a high profile in the local community. His mother, a pathologist, was known as a community resource. “She’s a good listener and helps guide people out of stressful situations,” said Dr. Bhardwaj. “They are very compassionate people, his parents, and maybe that’s where he’s getting his value system from.” Kashkari’s father is a retired engineer with a bent to public service, particularly in West Africa, where he spearheaded efforts to bring electricity and clean water to poor villages. Kashkari met his wife, Minal, in college at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They were married in a traditional Indian ceremony in Chicago where participants remember the bride being carried in on a festive palanquin and Kashkari, busy even then, taking the time to put each guest at ease.
Kashkari first worked at Goldman Sachs during the summer between his two years at Wharton, and impressed well enough to get a full time job after graduation. Academically, Kashkari was not outstanding, said a person familiar with the matter, but he appealed to Goldman’s recruiters because, as a former engineer, he was different than the usual aspiring investment banker. Kashkari’s head – shaved bald even then – also differentiated him from the reigning Goldman aesthetic, sometimes mockingly referred to as “The Borg” by rivals. “Everyone at Goldman has a full head of hair and went to prep school and Dartmouth and played lacrosse. That’s not Neel,” said an investment banker who knew him.
Goldman’s investment bankers were most impressed by Kashkari’s science background. His experience working on the James Webb Space Telescope for NASA contractor TRW gave him a comfort with technological jargon that would help Kashkari communicate with technology-company executives. Kashkari also spoke passionately of his entry in a car competition, the 1997 Sunrayce event in which Kashkari’s team built and raced a solar-powered car. His team didn’t win, but it did earn kudos. While other bankers at Goldman would often discuss their project du jour or details of a presentation even in their off-time, Kashkari often discussed cars and the Sunrayce experience.
When Kashkari returned to Goldman Sachs after business school, he worked with senior bankers advising companies in the software sector. As a junior banker, he did not have many responsibilities of his own; it was his job to prioritize and execute on the tasks given to him by others. (In many ways, that has also been Kashkari’s job at Treasury, where the strategy has been set by Hank Paulson.)
Kashkari did well enough that his bosses gave him an obscure sector to research and cover : information technology software, which included antivirus-program makers. The sector included many tiny companies that rarely hired or needed investment bankers, and Goldman Sachs did not have meaningful relationships with the leading companies. Kashkari impressed colleagues with his technical skill. Much of his job, however, was building relationships, a task that, in the world of investment banking, takes years. Although a few mergers and financings emerged from his work, many were not publicly disclosed because of their small size.
After Kashkari had spent only a couple of years covering IT software, the head of Goldman Sachs’s technology group, George Lee, recommended him to Paulson, who had then moved to Treasury.
“I never thought I’d see him in government,” said one banker who knew him. “He enjoyed being a banker and the respect that was conferred on him as being a Goldman banker.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Biden vs. Palin face to face. I’ll just let FactCheck.org do the talking. http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/factchecking_biden-palin_debate.html
Well it’s been a fortnight since I have posted my thoughts on something and it’s about time. Last Wednesday morning was quite exciting. At about 3:00am I awoke to the sound of hounds. I sat upright in my new Sleep Comfort bed (my number is 60 and Paula’s is 45) and questioned my alertness. Hounds? Hounds? or Hound? The longer I sat there assessing the situation I came to the determination that it was our hound, Jax (short for Jacklyn), that was barking her damn fool head off. Shit, I have to go see what is going on in the backyard at 3:00am. Let me find my 6 D-cell battery Maglight, better known as the LA police special (LAPS), and go have a looksee. Wait, it’s 3:00am and darker than coal-miners ass out there, I’d better arm myself with something that has a greater reach than 3 feet.
As I’m doing this, my wife tears open the patio door and runs out into the night to wage war, against god knows what, armed only with stupidity. Now I know how hard it is for the secret service to a protect the first lady.
It was nice to know that it was not a criminal of the human type but your friendly garbage digger-the Opossum. Jax had the damn thing boxed into the corner of the driveway gate and the brick wall between us and our neighbors. So we had to put the dog in the house, which meant having her run all over jumping up and down making all kinds of commotion. Whilst Paula took care of the dog I proceeded to the garage to get a rake so I could ever so gently coax the critter out of the yard so I could GET BACK TO SLEEP.
The Opossum does not move.
I go back in the house and realize that I don’t want the dog in the house.
I go back out to see if Opossum is gone. No.
I go back into the house and set the hounds loose again hopping the Opossum will run for it life. It does not.
I put the dog back in the house. I close up the doors and put the dog in our room with the door closed. I realize I don’t want the dog in the house.
The dog eventually calms and lays down. I try to sleep. I dream of back home, of my wonderful childhood where I would have just gone outside and shot the damn thing and threw the dead body out the next day and went to sleep. If the dog wouldn’t stop barking I would have shot it too. Ah, my heart aches for the rural life.
As you know Paula was doing the Avon Breast Cancer Walk this last weekend. So I think I’ll let her tell you all about her adventures.
When I saw the commercial to sign up for the Los Angeles walk, I stopped and thought, “I wonder if I could do that.” Well, after attending the planning meeting to hear what was required, I still hadn’t made up my mind. But, both Scott and I have lost loved ones in the past two years to cancer, and I never had the chance to say goodbye. So in their memory, I decided with my heart and made the decision to go through with the walk.
So, I trained by walking any moment that I had free time. I actually got a donation from my boss because he saw me walking after work and asked me what I was doing. Don’t figure huh!! Anyways, I knew that the 13 miles would be no problem on the first day, but I also had the option of continuing on and doing 26.3 miles. I decided I would let my body decide on that day and go from there.
Scott took me on the 13th to the Queen Mary and dropped me off with my overnite bag at 6 in the morning. They had an opening ceremony at 6:30, and then we were off walking. There was almost 3,000 people walking and we raised more then 5 million dollars that weekend. What a rush!!! So, we began in Long Beach and walked the beach for awhile, then headed inland and wound around the neighborhood. We had lunch at mile marker 9 and then continued on. By mile 13 I was feeling no pain and joined the other woman and men who continued the trek of 26.3 miles. By mile marker 21 I was clocked in as number 289 passing through.
They had a movie theme and a red carpet for you to walk through. I was sooooo hot and tired, I only stopped to fill up on water and continue on in fear of stopping and not wanting to continue on. There was a person there handing out popcorn, and I thought ewe why would I want to eat popcorn, it would just make me thirsty. Turns out is was Cameron Diaz dressed up as some character from a movie (couldn’t tell you which one). But I was too tired to notice. I kept going.
By mile 23 I stopped to bandage a small blister on my small toe, and continue on. My knee was really starting to hurt and I was starting to limp, and couldn’t keep up with a lot of others. I kept going through the park, the whole time my mind kept telling me to sit down, but everywhere I looked there was no benches available. I thought of Rachel and her soccer game she had that morning because there was quite a few games being played in the park. Once leaving the park I was able to catch up with a few other woman who were actually older then me. We were all limping, the others had blood blisters on the bottom of there feet, but wouldn’t give up. We all hobbled along together. We all even passed a penny on the sidewalk that was heads up, but none of us would stoop to pick it up because we were sooooo tired.
When we finally arrived at the park, all the woman I hobbled in with stopped to take a picture at mile marker 26. They asked me if I wanted to take a picture and of course i said Hell no, if I stop now, I might not make it. I made it through the finish line for the day with a big welcome from a bunch of people. I had two angel helpers grab my bag for me and offer to set up my tent. Then when we went to where my tent should go, it was already set up.
Well it turns out that my tent buddy for the night only did the 13 miles and was reading a book inside the tent. I was never soooo relieved to sit down in my life!!! My tent mate was Elise Green and she was my lifesaver for the rest of the weekend. She was so proud of me doing 26miles. She got me up and going to the showers telling me there hot and you will feel better. I did. When I got back to the tent, I had intended to read my book as well, but all I could muster the strength to so was hold my book on my chest and close my eyes and hope that the advil that I took would kick in. My angel Elise got me up and to the food tent to eat, otherwise I would have just laid there until the next day. After dinner and the follies, we went back to our tent, took some advil and read for awhile, then called it a night.
By 5 a.m. our alarms went off and we started to get ready for the next 13.2 miles. We had breakfast and started our walk at 7. By the second mile I was limping pretty bad and it felt like a bone chip in my knee. It hurt pretty bad, so much so that Elise decided she would call the sweeper van to take me to the next rest area so i could get some medical help. I started to tear up and said no I didn’t want to go in the sweeper car, and I would make it to the next stop and get some help. Well, they didn’t have any freeze up stuff, so my angel Elise gave me some heat rub and her ace bandage. I wrapped up my knee and we headed off.
This worked quite well, and at every stop after that I would put some more heat on and keep going. My partner in crime never left my side, nor did I hers. Last year was her first year doing the walk. She wasn’t able to finish because her ankles gave way at mile four and she was swept to the finish line. So, she herself was in bad shape and had heat packs wrapped around her waist to keep her going. I made sure she didn’t sit for more than five minutes and got her back up and we both kept going.
To see the Queen Mary just three miles out was a magnificent sight and great encouragement to finish. Both Elise and I crossed the finish line together with a hero’s welcome. It was AWESOME!!! With big hugs, we parted ways with the commitment to meet up again next year. Elise said she would do the 26 miles this time!!
Anyways, I called Scott to take me home because I hurt pretty bad. He packed me in ice and made me sit for a few hours. In the past few weeks I have been only able to walk about 3 miles at a time, taking it easy and getting my knee to heal. But come next year, I will do it again! My slogan for my campaign is A LITTLE CHANGE GOES A LONG WAY!
So keep emptying your pockets and think of me when you add up your coins. A little change can make a difference. A big thank you to all who supported me in this walk, I could never have done it with all your help! And a big hug to my husband who gave me 100% support in doing this, and our government rebate check as well!!! Love you honey XOXO!!!
Paula
Economists Warn Anti-Bush Merchandise Market Close To Collapse –ONN
Obama is selling to the people.
And Politico.com says
Today is the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer and Paula was really excited and a little bit nervous since she is walking by herself with nobody she really knows. But, I know her and she’ll have met some other nice women on the walk and she come back with some fun stories. I think I’ll get her to post her adventures on the blog.
Rachel’s soccer season has started again and she in now playing in area U16. This means she now has to travel to her games around the South Bay playing in the girls 16yr grouping. Her team has so far played Manhatten Beach and South Redondo Beach, 1 to 1 and 0 to 0, respectively.
The’re not winning, but they are not losing either. The repercussions will be if they get close to the playoffs they may very well have to play tie breakers which makes the season go into Christmas. Rachel played fullback for the first half and Goalie for the second. She must be an OK player since the coach never substitutes her in and out. After each game snacks are given out. Since it was a early game today, 7:30am, donuts were provided. On the way home Rachel was licking her fingers clean from the sugar glaze of her donut and remarked how it tasted like a sugar coated goalie glove. I don’t want to know what that tastes like.
TSS: A look at today’s fiscal responsibility
