Today is a good day

For those of you who enjoy those funny animations about the president, here's a site with a bunch of original ones. This parody of Monty Python's Quest For The Holy Grail is my favorite.

There's a followup on the Dubai Shopping Festival. The big prize, 100 kg of gold, was won by a 9 year old Indian girl. Her father works as a timekeeper at a local construction company. The family says the gold won't change anything.

The Talking Dog offers an insiders view of bankruptcy reform.
As regular readers know, one of my prior incarnations was as a consumer bankruptcy lawyer, at one time, working for a variety of lawyers that had me probably involved in more consumer bankruptcy cases than anyone in the New York area.
And in hundreds upon hundreds of cases, the grim scenarios were always the same: a job loss (sometimes, even just the loss of a part time second job), an illness or death of a breadwinner, divorce and its attendant after effects, or sometimes, just accumulation of debts from rising interest rates and flat incomes and rising living expenses.
Bankruptcy "reform" is simply a classic case of redistributive risk: from those most able to bear it, to those least. It's not merely bad, its downright evil.

As I mentioned before, Iraq is missing somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 billion dollars. That's the money that was supposed to rebuild the country. Now it becomes obvious why everything's still a mess. Someone went to the Dubai Shopping Festival. I guess if they won anything, they didn't put it back in the kitty. Now tell me again how there didn't need to be bidding on Iraq reconstruction contracts because Halliburton was the only company that could do the job. Did we really pay Halliburton $1.9 million to guarantee that? I guess since it's not our schools, hospitals, roads, phones, electricity, gasoline, etc. that didn't get paid for, why should we care. Oh, wait, they were overcharging the military for fuel, food, and laundry. Did I mention they get paid way more than the soldiers. That's ok, though, because privatization is the wave of the future. How else can we achieve Rumsfeld's vision of a lighter, faster military? Outsourcing? And isn't it pretty cool, in a gangsta sort of way, to hear about people getting to carry $2 million in wrapped bricks of hundreds. I guess inflation has struck the price of freedom. Surely it didn't used to cost $3.9 billion a month.