This one will be a story, within a story…where’s Christopher Nolan when you need him?

I wanted to make some martini one night, and I didn’t have any vodka.  Deirdre and Jordan were out and planning on coming over later, so I asked them to swing by the state store to pick up some vodka for me.  They wound up at my mom’s house, got distracted and lost track of time, and the wound up staying late enough to miss their chance to stop at the state store on their way home.  They mentioned their predicament to my mom, and she said that she thought she actually had a bottle of vodka that they could have.

The fact that my mom had a bottle of vodka was unusual alone, but as we would find out, this bottle of vodka was no ordinary bottle of vodka.  She went into her bedroom and pulled a tall blue box from her closet.  This box had been in her closet for about 10 years, when it came from my grandfather’s kitchen, where it had been sitting for another 20 or so years.

As the story goes, when my parents were living in Maryland, near Washington, D.C. in the late 70s,  my grandmother had gone down to spend some time with them around Christmas.  While she was down there, they went to the mall, and in one of the stores, my grandmother found a lady’s purse with a wallet in it.  My grandmother took it to the counter, but with her faith in humanity, she decided she did not trust the clerk not to take the cash, so she decided she would take the responsibility to return it to its owner herself.  They went home, looked up the person in the phone book, and the lady on the other end was delighted to know she had her wallet!  The lady gave her address to my grandmother to return it in person.  As they approached the house, they realized this was The USSR Ambassador’s house, and the lady’s wallet was the ambassador’s wife.  In exchange for the good deed, my grandmother was given this box of vodka, straight from the U.S.S.R.

And here it sits; unopen and slowly becoming a part of world history as an product of a country that no longer exists.  I was flabbergasted that my mom would just send this 35 year old bottle of vodka up and expect me just to crack it open and drink it.  This is a unique item!  this is an heirloom!

I wish I could be invisible.  Yeah, flying is nice, but it sounds tiresome.  I think invisibility has at least the possibility of happening, I mean, as soon as we figure out how to bend light.

In follow up to my previous posts about wanting to collect dirt from around the country in small jars and display them…It looks like the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC has already done that in their soil exhibit.  Kind of ruins it for me now…not so sure this one is still on my list of things to do.  Here’s a video of the exhibit i took this weekend.

You know I don’t do the political rant thing often.  I always have my ear against the door, but barely ever do I walk into that chaos on the other side.  The past week has been too much for me, and I’m falling in.  I’m interested from a banking/economy, a current government side, as well as a presidential campaign perspective.  Honestly, and this will probably be the first time I’ve ever said it, you should be too.  There’s a lot going on right now, and it’s hard to keep a check on all the pulses.

Presidential Campaign – This is the easy one.  John McCain is an idiot.  He’s either too old to multi-task, or he’s too stupid to think clearly.  This dude is obviously not fit to be president.  We already have someone that quits to go relax, do we really need another?  He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and it shows.  Last week he says the economy is still strong.  Saturday a 3 page proposal is released to congress to review as a solution for the financial crisis.  Monday, McCain says stuff is going to hit the fan.  Tuesday, Mccain says he hasn’t read the 3 page document yet.  Wednesday, he cancels his appearance on Letterman and says that he wants to postpone the debate and his campaign so he can focus on fixing the crisis.  Ego trip much?   He ends up staying in New York until Thursday anyway, and manages to fit in a stop to Katie Couric.  By the time he’s in DC, an approved solution is already announced.  Worthless.  Even Senator Charles Schumer has said Bush needs to, ""respectfully tell Sen. McCain to get out of town. He is not helping, he is harming. Before Sen. McCain made his announcement, we were making progress."  This dude is a train wreck, and he’s not even in office.  Let alone the circus around Palin.  He obviously picked her for her shock value.  She’s been completely absent since.  Worthless.  Smoke & mirrors.  Sham.

Current Government - We’re starting to see the true colors of what goes on in our nation’s capital.  These people have no accountability, and they slack off their whole careers, and when it comes time to get your crap together and do something, they don’t know how to work together.  Henry Paulson apparently begged on 1 knee to the democrats not to tell the presses how bad the meetings went.  Bush is actually doing something it seems, at least trying to get everyone to work together and encouraging discussion.  What we have though are people from 2 different sides of the fence.  You have people with big business and money backgrounds (who, in my opinion should not be allowed to be in politics) like Henry Paulson, and then you have people that have pure legislative backgrounds who know nothing about the market crisis, or how to appropriately manage it.  You know this $700 billion number that’s been tossed around?  Ask someone where they came up with that number.  A Treasury spokeswoman says:

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

OMG.  Are we serious???  We have no idea what we’re dealing with here.  Enter malfeasance probe.  We’re actually going back to the businesses that are in trouble and looking for fraud.  That won’t take long.

Back on track to progressive thinking though, is this really what we want to do?  These companies knew their loans were risky, but they went in anyway.  Preying on poor people to meet their self-serving pockets.  If the government buys all these loans, it doesn’t just end there either.  Now we’re looking at the government serving a role it’s never had.  It actually has potential to MAKE money in this deal…but is this a good thing?!?!  It’s like a whole form of backdoor taxation that I do not approve of.  If you need me to spell it out for you, the government will pay, we’ll say, 1 trillion, for debts that are worth more than 2.2 trillion fully matured.  Do we really want our government acting for a profit?  That money is coming from home owners and normal people.  That brings a whole new level of shadiness and potential for cover ups that I’m not comfortable with.

Economy/business – Cluster ****.  That’s pretty accurate.  Already in the shadows is the fact that we’re letting Morgan Stanley & Goldman Sachs change their status from investment banks to bank holding companies.  While I don’t disagree with this solution, it’s scary.  By changing their status, they become regulated by the Federal Reserve, but they also have more access to borrow more money.  These are the last and largest investment banks and brings them into the 4th and 6th largest bank holding companies.  I’m worried about their practices, or their problems, becoming contagious and bringing down the bank holding or asset management areas of banking.  By association alone, the market is cracking.  BNY Mellon has very limited exposure to any of the bad debt that is in the news, but our stock, with everyone else, is falling.  We’re even throwing $425 million to help out Lehman’s crash because they’re stock is falling below $1/share.  We’ve got Wamu going under and being bought out so that they don’t deplete FIDC funds.  That’s nuts!  We’re going to be left with a dozen or so big banks.  It’s like a survival of the fittest scenario, only with a global scale economy.  If these companies get the bailout they’re after from the government, no one pays but the American people.  Some heads need to roll for sure, and they better have CEO next to their names.

I’m starting to hear about a new government plan now to insure the debts instead of just buying their out right.  That might be a little better.  This has been something on Barack’s campaign since day one.  I think that about sums everything up. 

I’m not writing a paper here, so i don’t care to cite anything, but I’ll give you a few links and tell you to watch the Colbert Report, the Daily show, and CNN.  I’m curious to see what NPR has to say too.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08270/915335-68.stm?cmpid=generalbusiness.xml

http://video.newsweek.com/#?c=40211&l=1785302026&t=1818133680

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122230704116773989.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Raines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08268/914648-100.stm

http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/09/23/bailout-paulson-congress-biz-beltway-cx_jz_bw_0923bailout.html

http://orlando.bizjournals.com/orlando/othercities/atlanta/stories/2008/09/22/daily4.html