hey parents, THIS is how to be clever with kids...

good site for monitoring the abuses of our tax money by the financial industry...

The Bailout Begins - BailoutSleuth:

Today, BailoutSleuth begins tracking the federal government's $700 billion plan to rescue troubled banks and financial services companies by using public money to buy distressed assets or inject additional capital

We'll be posting daily updates on the bailout, with an emphasis on monitoring the government's deals and examing the companies and individuals involved in them.

I *really* worry now...

Political Radar: Palin Fears Media Threaten Her First Amendment Rights:

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

Well, I worry about two things.

1. That she doesn't have the education of a high school graduate on what the First Amendment really means.
   
   or...
   
   
2. That she does, because the average high school graduate doesn't know shit about the Constitution.

ok, everyone, DUCK!

Space station trash plunging to Earth - Space.com- msnbc.com:

A piece of space station trash the size of a refrigerator is poised to plunge through the Earth's atmosphere late Sunday, more than a year after an astronaut tossed it overboard.

NASA and the U.S. Space Surveillance Network are tracking the object — a 1,400-pound (635-kilogram) tank of toxic ammonia coolant thrown from the international space station — to make sure it does not endanger people on Earth. Exactly where the tank will inevitably fall is currently unknown, though it is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere Sunday afternoon or later that evening, NASA officials said.

so today, my first at40 since faire started...

...and it's 1980 itself, which means it is going to suck.  i'm not bothering.  we'll try again next week...

Italy: Cinque Terra - coastal towns of the Mediterranean 9/26/08

Part of our touring (arranged by my brother-in-law) included a trip through Tuscany to the western coastline. Here, the architecture is much more modern than Roman times or the Renaissance. It's a post-card of an aspect of 19th century Italy that has, with exception of a bit of increase in tourism, has remained mostly frozen in time. Studying it closely, you can see it as the Italianate inspiration for much of The Prisoner's Portmerion.

In addition are some more artistic shots of the mountains. Any bright white you see isn't snow or ice: it's marble.

An interesting highlight shot:

From Italy Cinque Terra 08/09/26

Yes, that is what it looks like. A German WW2 Pill Box. It's about the only WW2 remnant we saw the entire trip except for some areas along the train tracks in Rome (where the area simply has never been reconstructed in 65 years).

When will a certain McCain supporter wake up to the great lie?

The Wurzelbacher Effect - washingtonpost.com:

Take a look at the biggest-ticket items in the federal budget: Almost all, outside of spending on defense and veterans, are premised on at least an element of wealth-spreading. In Social Security, as the Congressional Budget Office has calculated, retirees who earned less get back a greater share of what they put into the system than higher-earning retirees; the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program provides extra help for low-income elderly or disabled. That's wealth-spreading. Ditto Medicaid, the shared federal-state program to provide health care to the poor; unemployment insurance; the State Children's Health Insurance Program, for children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid; food stamps; and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the modern welfare program. Medicare, because of a sensible change adopted under the Bush administration, requires better-off seniors to pay higher premiums; it provides extra subsidies for low-income beneficiaries to pay for prescription drugs. The bulk of federal spending on education goes to students in disadvantaged schools (Title I for kindergarten through 12th grade) and to help lower- and middle-income students pay for college (Pell Grants). Most pointedly, since it mirrors the refundable credit that Mr. Obama proposes, the earned-income tax credit -- which Mr. McCain described in 1999 as a "much-needed tax credit for working Americans" -- provides extra income to the working poor.

It's not at all clear that Mr. McCain actually buys into -- or has seriously thought through -- the implications of the conversation he has unleashed. "Taxes pay to keep our government secure, to help those who can't help themselves and other functions of government," he told CNN's Larry King the other night. But a graduated income tax, he argued, is "a far cry from taking from one group of Americans and giving to another. I mean, that's dramatically different." Really?

[...]

Ironically -- perversely, even -- the railing against wealth-spreading comes at a time when the wealth has been spread less evenly than ever, although the economic downturn will no doubt reverse the trend temporarily. As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities testified before the House Ways and Means Committee the other day, in 2006 the share of pre-tax income flowing to the top 1 percent of households reached its highest level since 1928. The share of after-tax income going to the top 20 percent and the top 1 percent in 2005 was the highest on record since the Congressional Budget Office began analyzing the data in 1979. Some of this is due to the structure of the Bush tax cuts, which -- as Mr. McCain pointed out at the time they were enacted -- disproportionately favored the wealthiest Americans. Mr. Obama's proposal to roll back the top bracket tax cuts and to bolster the bottom with refundable credits is an effort to address this inequity.

"I don't know when we decided to make a virtue out of selfishness," Mr. Obama said in Missouri on Friday. Not quite "ask not what your country can do for you" lyricism. But a start, perhaps

I don't know, Mr. O. I think that selfishness has often been at the very heart of the "family values" movement for the last 20 years.

Italy: Florence at Night September 24th through 27th, 2008

Photos back in time - Portmeirion, July 2005

Prior to the main parts of the UK2K5 Morris tour, faireraven and I visited Portmeirion, where almost 40 years before The Prisoner was filmed.