Here’s an email that is going around:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret
business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of
America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large
transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in
this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS,
who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a
Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking
deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank
check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly
transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are
constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should
look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin
so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and
college fund account numbers and those of your children and
grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer
your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information,
I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be
used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury

Henry Paulson

All the changes made to the original bailout bill are meaningless. Their only point is to provide political cover to the representatives who vote for it. See Congressional Charade: Changes in Bailout Bill Cosmetic, and Everyone Knows That. What’s astonishing to me is the lemming like way the Congressional Republicans are following Bush and Paulson off a cliff. I truly believe now that this coming election is the end of the Republican Party.

From his latest speech:

“There is no nice way to say this, so I will be blunt: Our credit markets had contracted a hideous STD—a securitization transmitted disease—for which lowering the funds rate to negative real levels seemed to me to be not only an ineffective treatment, but a palliative and maybe even a stimulus that would only encourage further mischief.”

See more from his speech at Naked Capitalism.

Both New Gingrich and Paul Krugman are against this ridiculous bailout. That should be enough to demonstrate that it is a bad idea, but I still think it’s going to pass. The congressional leadership of both parties are too deeply entwined with the financial industry to prevent it. The only amusing part of this crisis is reading the naive commentary from the left who apparently believe that the Democrats are less involved than the Republicans in this corruption. At this point, the differences between the Republicans and Democrats are as irrelevant to the main issues of the day as the differences between the Aristocrats and the Populares were during the late years of the Roman Republic. And we all know how that story ended.

UPDATE: Obama saying he may keep Paulson on, has apparently woken up at least one of his supporters to the kind of change he is offering. see here.

See Twitter has a new look.

Check out Jeff Jarvis’s post Google: Monopoly or Marketplace where Jeff claims that Google is not a monopoly, while describing it in a way that clearly indicates it is. The collapse of Yahoo has left Google in total control of the search advertising market. If you run a commercial website of any kind, you have to get up every morning and worry about what Google is doing to you, and you have no recourse. Google raises rates on adwords: you have no recourse. Google cuts your share of revenue on text ads on your site: you have no recourse. You have no recourse, because Google has no viable competitors. No viable competitors means they have a monopoly. And, no amount of dancing around the issues by bloggers like Jeff Jarvis will change that fact.

As I have previously written on this blog, I am a big fan of the burritos from Como Esta in Palo Alto. I usually get their super burrito, but they also make a mini burrito which has no sour cream or guacamole. I bought one the other day for a family member. Here’s a picture:

As usual, the burrito was great.

The other day I was in need of some quick food, so I grabbed a $1 frozen, carnitas chimichanga at the drugstore, and microwaved it when I got home. Here’s a picture:

I added the salsa myself, obviously. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the chimichanga. Although not outstanding, it was a hell of a lot better than the frozen burritos I ate all through college.