One more thing, Mr. Nutjob... about your paper's candidate

Setting aside for the moment who's to blame for this mess, what about getting us out of it? Your paper endorses the senior citizenSenator from Arizona. What's he doing these days to resolve the fiscal crisis? Let's check in on that real quick:

And so, a bailout proposal that once seemed likely to pass now is back to negotiations. In the process, Secretary Paulson was reduced to getting on his knees to beg House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to have her party members bail on the proposal; President Bush was forced to ponder a market meltdown on his watch; and Democrats were left fuming that in a bid for the leadership spotlight, John McCain may have simply gone and fouled things up.

"Bush is no diplomat," said a Democratic staffer, "but he's Cardinal freaking Richelieu compared to McCain. McCain couldn't negotiate an agreement on dinner among a family of four without making a big drama with himself at the heroic center of it. And then they'd all just leave to make themselves a sandwich."

Smooth move.

A wee bit of wonkery

On WTOP this morning, some nutjob from the Washington Times said the current fiscal crisis is the fault of overregulation, specifically the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

A primer:

The Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA, Pub.L. 95-128, title VIII, 91 Stat. 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901 et seq.) is a United States federal law that requires banks and thrifts to offer credit throughout their entire market area and prohibits them from targeting only wealthier neighborhoods with their services, a practice known as "redlining." The purpose of the CRA is to provide credit, including home ownership opportunities to underserved populations and commercial loans to small businesses. It has been subjected to important regulatory revisions.

Now, explain to me, Mr. Nutjob, how did a law to prohibit financial institutions from "redlining" force Wall Street whiz kids to create sophisticated credit default swaps and leverage themselves out of business? That's (CRA is, according to Mr. Nutjob) a magic bullet with an incredibly slow velocity, taking fully 31 years to pierce the heart of global finance. No less a personage than the estimable Warren Buffet criticizes these pieces of hokum as "financial weapons of mass destruction". But, again, Mr. Nutjob says it's not the whiz kids and their FWMDs, it's the poor folks who used CRA to get a house, that are to blame for this mess.

But that's not the point of this post. The point is when I pointed all this out to my wife, who was driving me to work, she asked why I don't do political work instead of political armchair quarterbacking.

Good question.

I holler at the TV a lot. Maybe one day I'll be on TV hollering instead. I dig this wonkery stuff.

Hanna who?

We thought Hanna was supposed to be some kind of storm. I actually bought a tarp, finagled it into the gap between our porch and the Nicholson's porch, and set up an elaborate system of towel rotation-to-spin cycle water damage prevention in our leaky basement.

For what? A little bit of a trickle? It's been an hour and my towels aren't soaked through. Hanna, you disappoint.

P.S.,
Not to disregard the very real damage done. It just didn't happen so much at our house.

P.P.S., The tally:
$ 5.97 >12 towels
$ 9.27 >200 'rags-in-a-box'
$22.98 >9'x12' tarp (flammable!)
$ 2.20 >sales tax
$40.42 >total earned by Home Depot #2583