Barack Obama is taking some heat over the rather extreme views espoused by a minister of the church he has attended for the last 20 years. I don't think one can rightfully assign the Reverend Jerimiah Wright's racist view of the world to Obama, regardless of the depth of their relationship. I do think Obama's lame "Gee I didn't know" excuse is a bunch of crap. Pure politics as usual spin. No hope. No change. My opinion is that Obama heard this crap for years and just didn't think anything of it because to him it's ordinary.

Not that it really matters. I was NEVER going to vote for the man. Regardless of skin pigment or genitalia, I'm not voting for the socialist in this or any election.

The choir the daughter belongs to gave a concert at West Point yesterday. She unfortunately could not go because she was sick with a fever and laryngitis. She wanted to go even if all she could do was lip sync, and without the fever she would have.

I'm sitting in my cube in the new building the company moved to, looking out the window at the reservoir, typing this on the PDA because my laptop is not well today. I strongly suspect it might have something to do with the software update to Office 04 (MAC) that I installed yesterday. Because it was running fine before that. I decided to do this while attempting to run some maintenance software. I'm hoping it will distract me long enough for it to fix something before I decide it's not working and cancel it again.

I used to have this great tool called Applejack. It ran off a command code when you booted in single user mode. It was a little strange at first to see my MAC running with a black screen and green type waiting for me to key in commands, but it would do the job every time. Alas there is no version compatible with Leopard.

OK that didn't work. I mean I stopped the thing because it seemed to be stuck. Maybe I'm too impatient. I downloaded another maintenance program (Safari is the only app that seems to work. Useful enough but I need Illustrator and Photoshop to launch to get any work done).

Two and half hours later and full function appears to be restored. I really miss Applejack.

Since having a blog makes me qualified to comment on anything and everything, here's my take on the mortgage crisis and the bail-out of Bear Sterns.

Politicians are quick to blame the whole sub-prime mortgage crisis on deceptive and predatory lenders. In other words people who committed fraud. And instead of putting them in jail pending their bail payment, they're bailing them out.

Here's how I would handle it. Take the basic standard for fair legal lending practices. If a borrower can prove that the lender did not meet those minimum requirements, i.e. committed fraud, then their loan is closed, the property is theirs and the lender eats the loss on their way to trial on criminal fraud charges.

If you can't prove the fraud, you're on the hook for the loan. The lender can foreclose and get what they can for the property to minimize their loss.

If you're a lender and you made bad loans, well that's your own damn problem. If you resorted to fraud in selling those loans I hope you enjoy prison as much as you do bankruptcy.

Pain is how we learn from our mistakes. And it looks like we need to learn a few financial lessons. Government stepping in to cushion the blow isn't going to help us learn anything but how to let the government run more of our lives.

I really like the way James Lileks summed it up:

Speaking as an utter amateur, I’m worried less about a recession than inflation. I’m worried most about a recession, inflation AND a jolly round of trade wars, coupled with fragile banks, overcapacity, diminished consumer confidence and aggressive messianic collectivism. Something about that smells familiar. I love studying the thirties and forties, but not first hand.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 01:36 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment